Native American Writers (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African-American Poets: Volume I African-American Poets: Volume II Aldous Huxley Alfred, Lord Tennyson Alice Munro Alice Walker American Women Poets: 1650–1950 Amy Tan Anton Chekhov Arthur Miller Asian-American Writers August Wilson The Bible The Brontës Carson McCullers Charles Dickens Christopher Marlowe Contemporary Poets Cormac McCarthy C.S. Lewis Dante Alighieri David Mamet Derek Walcott Don DeLillo Doris Lessing Edgar Allan Poe Émile Zola Emily Dickinson Ernest Hemingway Eudora Welty Eugene O’Neill F. Scott Fitzgerald Flannery O’Connor Franz Kafka Gabriel García Márquez Geoffrey Chaucer George Orwell G.K. Chesterton

Gwendolyn Brooks Hans Christian Andersen Henry David Thoreau Herman Melville Hermann Hesse H.G. Wells Hispanic-American Writers Homer Honoré de Balzac Jamaica Kincaid James Joyce Jane Austen Jay Wright J.D. Salinger Jean-Paul Sartre John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets John Irving John Keats John Milton John Steinbeck José Saramago Joseph Conrad J.R.R. Tolkien Julio Cortázar Kate Chopin Kurt Vonnegut Langston Hughes Leo Tolstoy Marcel Proust Margaret Atwood Mark Twain Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Maya Angelou Miguel de Cervantes Milan Kundera Nathaniel Hawthorne Native American Writers Norman Mailer

Octavio Paz Paul Auster Philip Roth Ralph Ellison Ralph Waldo Emerson Ray Bradbury Richard Wright Robert Browning Robert Frost Robert Hayden Robert Louis Stevenson The Romantic Poets Salman Rushdie Samuel Taylor Coleridge Stephen Crane Stephen King Sylvia Plath Tennessee Williams Thomas Hardy Thomas Pynchon Tom Wolfe Toni Morrison Tony Kushner Truman Capote Walt Whitman W.E.B. Du Bois William Blake William Faulkner William Gaddis William Shakespeare: Comedies William Shakespeare: Histories William Shakespeare: Romances William Shakespeare: Tragedies William Wordsworth Zora Neale Hurston

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

Native american writers New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom

Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Native American Writers—New Edition Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informaÂ�tion storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Native American writers / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. â•…â•… p. cm. — €(Blooms’s modern critical views) â•… Includes bibliographical references and index. â•… ISBN 978-1-60413-591-6 (hardcover : alk paper) 1. €American literature--Indian authors—History and criticism. 2. €Indians of North America—Intellectual life. 3. €Indians in literature. €I. Bloom, Harold. PS153.I52N388 2010 810.9’897—dc22â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… 2010006006 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Cover design by Alicia Post Composition by Bruccoli Clark Layman Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY Date printed: May 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents

Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives E. Shelley Reid

5

“Thinking Like an Indian”: Exploring American Indian Views of American History Frederick E. Hoxie Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith: Religious Syncretism in Louise Erdrich’s and Joy Harjo’s “Mixed-Blood” Poetry Sheila Hassell Hughes Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology and the Ethnic Subjectivity of N. Scott Momaday Jason W. Stevens

25

41

65

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie’s Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven 93 Joseph L. Coulombe

vi

Contents

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing, Transatlantic Travel, and Modernist Arson in Gardens in the Dunes A. M. Regier

115

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism: Nations, Narratives, and Critical Traditions Gary Totten Poem and Tale as Double Helix in Joy Harjo’s A Map to the Next World Angelique V. Nixon

137

171

Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence 189 Elizabeth Gargano Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration in the Petitions of Samson Occom Caroline Wigginton Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding in James Welch’s Historical Fiction Joseph L. Coulombe Chronology

251

Contributors

259

Bibliography

261

Acknowledgments Index

273

271

203

229

H arold B loom

Introduction

T

Nat i v e A mer ic a n Wr i t er s

he Sioux Outbreak of 1890 took part of its origin in the Ghost-Dance religion. James Mooney, whose 1896 account of that event and that faith included his versions of Ghost-Dance songs, prefaced his translations with a useful summary both of doctrine and of the lyrics: The great underlying principle of the ghost dance doctrine is that the time will come when the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery. On this foundation each tribe has built a structure from its own mythology, and each apostle and believer has filled in the details according to his own mental capacity or ideas of happiness, with such additions as come to him from the trance . . . The differences of interpretation are precisely such as we find in Christianity, with its hundreds of sects and innumerable shades of individual opinion. The white race, being alien and secondary and hardly real, has no part in this scheme of aboriginal regeneration, and will be left behind with the other things of earth that have served their temporary purpose, or else will cease entirely to exist. There is no limit to the number of these songs, as every trance at every dance produces a new one, the trance subject after regaining consciousness embodying his experience in the spirit world in the ˘

˘

Harold Bloom

form of a song, which is sung at the next dance and succeeding performances until superseded by other songs originating in the same way. Thus, a single dance may easily result in twenty or thirty new songs. While songs are thus born and die, certain ones which appeal especially to the Indian heart . . . live and are perpetuated. There are also with each tribe certain songs which are a regular part of the ceremonial, as the opening song and the closing song, which are repeated at every dance. Of these the closing song is the most important and permanent. In some cases certain songs constitute a regular series, detailing the experiences of the same person in successive trance visions. Mooney’s versions of the Ghost-Dance songs are now most readily available in John Hollander’s superb Library of America anthology, American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume two. Shamanistic and wonderfully expressive, the songs have a pathos and intensity that testify to the awesome power of the Ghost-Dance religion. Invoking the Father and the Morning Star, the songs celebrate the faithful who “have danced until daylight,” and then call out to the coming whirlwind. The Sioux, with marvelous poignancy, associate the arrival of the ghost-warriors with the return of the buffalo, decimated by white slaughterers. Repetition is employed with skill and a fine control of visual perspective in one of the Sioux Ghost-Dance chants: The whole world is coming, A nation is coming, a nation is coming, The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe. The father says so, the father says so. Over the whole earth they are coming. The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming, The Crow has brought the message to the tribe, The father says so, the father says so. A Mowa song catches something of the same ethos of expectation: The spirit army is approaching, The spirit army is approaching, The whole world is moving onward, The whole world is moving onward, See! Everybody is standing watching, See! Everybody is standing watching, Let us all pray, Let us all pray.

Introduction

˘

Franz Boas, reporting in 1897 on the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, gives us a version of a Ghost-Dancer’s song very different from the apocalyptic expectations of the Sioux: You sent us everything from out of the under world, ghosts! who take away man’s senses. You heard that we were hungry, ghosts! who take away man’s senses. We shall receive plenty from you, ghosts! who take away man’s senses. Here we are beyond the hopes that fed the Sioux Outbreak, and are held instead by the implicit despair of a shamanism that surrenders perception in a desperate exchange for sustenance. The polarities of the Ghost-Dance songs are part of the heritage of modern Native American literature. So far, that literature is stronger in narrative, particularly autobiographical fiction, than it is in poetry. But the poets who will return to their own equivalents of the Ghost-Dance songs now begin to develop, and the apocalyptic intensity of the heroic Sioux Outbreak will find further literary expression and fulfillment.

E . S helley R eid

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

I

n their study of American individualism, Robert N. Bellah and his associates report that the mostly white and middle class Americans to whom they spoke “have difficulty articulating the richness of their commitments [to other people]. In the language they use, their lives sound more isolated and arbitrary than they really are” (21). The researchers conclude with concern that “the language of individualism, the primary American language of self-understanding, limits the ways in which people think” (290, my emphasis). Carol Tavris, writing in The Mismeasure of Woman, puts it even more succinctly: “We must be careful about the explanations and narratives we choose to account for our lives because . . . we live by the stories we tell” (312). While both studies note a crucial issue in contemporary American cultural studies, how we identify ourselves as individuals and as Americans, they focus primarily on Euro-American representations of identity, and, perhaps as a result, leave their readers with more cautions than recommendations. Modern American literature in fact offers us access to a wide variety of viable alternative self-concepts and narrations of identity; broadening Bellah’s “people,” and Tavris’s “we” to include and recognize the significance of American stories not strictly descended from European origins may reveal that there is less cause for concern than they imply and more cause for celebration.1 MELUS, Volume 25, Numbers 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2000): pp. 65–86. Copyright © 2000 MELUS.

˘

˘

E. Shelley Reid

To be sure, in contemporary America our stories are still predominantly influenced by the autobiographical narrative styles created over two centuries ago in Europe. “The mythical American success story—whether told by Cooper, Twain, Hemingway and Hammett, or by John Wayne, Phil Donahue, and Dan Rather—still examines primarily “our deepest identity” as individuals, using the narrative paradigms developed by ‘late eighteenth-century writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin. In these narratives, the self-made, self-reliant man explains how he has progressed beyond the naïveté of youth, has overcome the obstacles placed in his way by society, and has put the past behind him to become a confident, productive individual. He assumes all the authority of the author’s position, assuring us that he alone can and will tell the true story about himself; we are invited to believe the facts of his story as he presents them. Despite literary innovations which have given us other stories from which to choose, such as stories of chaotic times and antiheroes, of absurdity and inaction, the earlier paradigm has retained popularity and cultural currency. Though limited in scope, these traditional autobiographical paradigms offer powerful opportunities, even for Americans of non-European ancestry. For minority Americans, writing (or co-writing) their life stories has from the start produced both acceptance by the reading public and a chance to claim and (re)tell their own stories. Slave narratives, “as-told-to” Indian autobiographies, and exoticized stories of Asian immigrants helped open doors for other writers to create and publish poetry, fiction, and other genres. Yet, the impulse to focus on stories of identity has not weakened. As Shirley Geok-lin Lim notes, “For many ethnic writers, writing is frequently a writing of ‘the story of my life’ (or ‘of my people’s lives’), whether it takes the form of poetry, fiction, or autobiography” (27). Such “identity narratives,” a term meant to be more inclusive than “autobiography,” are thus at the heart of much ethnic and minority American writing. Of course, some writers with little or no cultural connection to eighteenth-century France would probably wish to revise the forms of these narratives, and have frequently done so; Jade Snow Wong’s third-person narration of her autobiography and N. Scott Momaday’s multiperspectival construction of his life story are but two examples. However, the genre and the reading public have resisted such revisions. Harriet Jacobs’s claim that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was a self-written, true, identity narrative was discounted for over a century, while contemporary booksellers still often have trouble deciding in which section Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior belongs. Each book breaks just enough “rules” to make audiences wary. Expanding the range of stories we tell about ourselves, and, importantly, those in which we recognize our selves, is a mammoth task.

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

˘

Enter Louise Erdrich. Like many other Native American authors, Erdrich faces a textual and cultural challenge: to reclaim a Native American idenfity2 from the Coopers and Disneys of Euro-American culture, and then to find a way to share it with an audience that suspects that she and her culture are on the brink of extinction. Autobiography would seem a useful tool to accomplish this task, yet there are several complications. For instance, Arnold Krupat argues that Euro-American culture’s most widely accepted form of identity narrative is entirely alien to Native American cultures: “[N]one of the conditions of production for autobiography—here I would isolate postNapoleonic historicism, egocentric individualism and writing as foremost— was typical of Native American cultures” (in Vizenor 55). Indeed, Paula Gunn Allen argues that the very idea of individual self-representation is fundamentally at odds with many Native American world-views (55). To a textual identity that both faithfully represents Native American concepts, and strikes non-Native readers as convincing, Erdrich has had to find a middle ground. Her astounding professional success over the past decade suggests that she has found just such a meeting place. Thus, while much has been written about her debts to American modernist narratives, I’d like to draw a different line of connection, tracing Erdrich’s re-visions and re-presentations of more familiar Euro-American identity narratives and the selves they celebrate. For the sake of time and space, this study focuses primarily on Love Medicine and Tracks, though Erdrich has continued to refine her mediation in subsequent texts. Specifically, I concentrate on how Erdrich modifies normative autobiographical narration, and the self/selves that can be represented within them, to broaden our storytelling space. Drawing on both Native American oral traditions and conventional Euro-American narrative forms, Erdrich creates a new set of textual gestures that can more faithfully capture the multiple voices and extended family networks of Native American “individuals.” Her narratives also allow the representation on of a larger community identity and weave her audience into the fabric of this extended family and its stories of survival. Understanding Erdrich’s reliance on and revisions of familiar personal narrative strategies can make it easier to see her emphasis on “stories of contemporary survivors” (“Where I Ought to Be” 23). Such a reading can also make us more sensitive to similar endeavors by other contemporary writers and give us the tools to begin to include and create new “explanations and narratives” to represent our American lives. Before discussing the alterations that Erdrich’s texts make, we need to be aware of how our own familiarity with traditional Western tropes may inform our reading of Erdrich’s narratives. Even without reading through the rush of autobiography criticism from the 1970s and 1980s, many readers would generally agree with one or more of the following generic definitions: Roy Pascal’s insistence that “The autobiography claims to be a true story,

˘

E. Shelley Reid

and it must qualify in respect to truth if it is to qualify at all” (60); Georges Gusdorf ’s assertion that autobiography comprises the “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life” (29) and “recomposes and interprets a life in its totality” (38); and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s founding promise: I must remain incessantly beneath [the reader’s] gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every least corner of my life. Indeed, he must never lose sight of me for a single instant, for if he finds the slightest gap in my story, the smallest hiatus, he may wonder what I was doing at that moment and accuse me of refusing to tell the whole truth. (65)

Erdrich’s “deviations” from these paradigms have left some critics struggling to appreciate her efforts. For example, after describing the fragmentary forces operating on colonized Native American cultures, David Mitchell argues that the resulting cultural disarray is a literary albatross: Erdrich’s “overriding concern” in Love Medicine, he writes, is “that something useful must be made out of the chaos and desolation that sits at the heart of the Native American experience today” (164). Using similar arguments, Pauline Woodward writes that Erdrich offers a new rendering of community to convey the remnants of Chippewa culture and the fragmented lives of contemporary people who endure despite the devastating loss of their tradition and the discontinuity of their existence. (11)

It is thus not only the text that seems fragmented and disorganized, but also the people it represents. Such readings emerge from Western beliefs that identity, and thus identity narrative, are supposed to be whole, uniform, and seamless, that fragmentation and ambiguity connote chaos and the failure of self-actualization. Furthermore, in the more familiar paradigm, “wholeness” of narrative and viewpoint signify truth, while we are encouraged to be suspicious of gaps or hesitations. Recognizing the cultural specificity of this judgment is the first crucial step to reading contemporary minority American texts as identity narratives within the tradition that gave us Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams. In the cultural setting of Erdrich’s texts, for instance, “wholeness” is indeed a central tenet, though it is represented differently. As Lydia Schultz explains, while the multivocal, fragmented narrative of â•›Western modernist and postmodernist prose is usually a signal of the destructive fragmentation and isolation experienced by modern (Western) people, it becomes something else in Erdrich’s texts. In Love Medicine, writes Schultz, “Multiperspectivity does

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

˘

not serve as the sign of uncertain, individual solutions that it is in dominant American culture. Instead, the multiple narrators are part of the repetition and variation of Chippewa storytelling” (91). In this cultural situation, “wholeness” is quite often represented as in flux, as Allen points out, the oral tradition that forms the foundation of Native American storytelling “is vital; it heals itself and the tribal web by adapting to the flow of the present while never relinquishing its connection to the past” (45). Moreover, David Brumble observes that most early Native American autobiographical narratives comprise several shorter narratives of separate events, with very little connecting narrative to link them together (22ff ). “Truth” is also a culturally defined category; in an oral performance, as scholars like Dennis Tedlock, and Arnold Krupat explain, any story that is told is always a version of the story, altered as the storyteller sees fit to keep the audience interested, make a specific point, or add a personal interpretation. Finally, the relationship between storyteller and audience in Native American narratives is less oppositional than the one Rousseau delineates. Brumble notes that stories were often told at communal gatherings or social events (told, often, as social events), with several members of the community participating in the performance. He quotes George Bird Grinnell’s description of one such session: At formal gatherings a man might tell a story and when it was finished might say: “The story is ended. Can anyone tie another to it?” Another man might then relate one, ending with the same words, and so stories might be told all about the lodge. (in Brumble 32)

Traditional Native American audiences are thus likely to be accustomed to stories that are linked, but not necessarily connected in the ways that Western audiences would expect, and that are told by a series of voices in different versions.3 Erdrich’s novels are not, of course, traditional oral performances. They are written texts that owe much to a long tradition of novelists and autobiographers. Yet she depends on some of the narrative gestures of oral performance because her characters, too, live by the stories they tell. Going back to the novels, we can see how the identity narrative gestures most familiar to Euro-American readers—a single unified narrator, linear presentation of narrative and character development, and chronological consistency (telling the whole story)—can be rewritten and yet still represent a complete identity. Erdrich’s novels, in fact, demonstrate how the use of multiple narrators helps alleviate the alienation of individual characters; how stories which are halftold, re-told, and left un-told suggest a common base or knowledge that ties

10

E. Shelley Reid

characters together and helps individuals and communities adapt to changing times; and how achronological, non-linear narrative structures recall the security of a web of stories, all tied to one another in a representation of personal stability and cultural survival. The first chapter of Love Medicine provides a crash course in these revised identity narratives. It opens with a lyrical description of the events leading up to June Morrissey’s sudden and inexplicable death in an Easter snowstorm, shifts to a first-person narrative by June’s niece Albertine, and then slides into a series of kitchen table conversations as more and more relatives arrive to reminisce about people and events familiar to the characters but entirely unfamiliar to the reader. These family stories seem to appear almost at random, skipping back and forth in time, relating events that happened both on and off the reservation to Indians, whites, and mixed-bloods. But by the end of the chapter, we discover that we have been introduced to nearly all the people who were important in June’s life: her adoptive parents Marie and Eli, her cousins Amelia and Zelda, her husband Gordie, and her sons King and Lipsha. By “tying another one to it,” the family members explain who June was (a loner like Eli), why she left (angry and frightened like King), and why she set off across the prairie in a snowstorm to walk home to them (like Albertine, drawn almost against her will to rejoin the family), all without mentioning more than a couple of specific facts about June herself. The exercise in the kitchen, then, is less a piecing together of remnants and fragments to form a seamless whole than a celebration of the many pieces that together made up June. The multiple storytellers in the chapter do more than (as a reader trained in Faulkner or James might expect) provide a number of points of view from which to regard June Morrissey; they help give us the whole complexity of June within her community, perhaps more fully than she could have told us herself in a monovocal narrative. In Tracks, the relationship between the two narrators, Nanapush and Pauline, is more antagonistic; although they tell stories that overlap and complement one another, Pauline and Nanapush speak from vantage points that differ in gender, generation, religion, and community standing. The two storytellers are often at odds in their hopes and plans for the citizens of the Matchimanito community, and each scoffs gently at the insight and credibility of the other: “She was worse than a Nanapush,” the old man says of the girl, “for while I was careful with my known facts, she was given to improving the truth” (39). But they share a high tolerance for ambiguity and do not directly contradict each other’s stories. Pauline, for example, is unconcerned that no one can decide who Lulu’s father is; as she notes, the story that old men tell “comes up different every time, and has no ending, no beginning. They get the middle wrong, too” (31). The multivocal narration in Tracks thus strikes a balance between seeking the truth through the accretion of different

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

11

community viewpoints and binding the community together through repetition and reinforcement of even the most dubious stories. As with Love Medicine, its multivocality can be read as an approximation of the Native American collaborative storytelling that helps ensure community survival. Thus both novels do indeed move toward the completeness of revelation and continuity of lives lived for which Rousseau strove, and may in fact be more successful at such representations. The novels also depend heavily on multiple versions of key stories, a revision of the once-through, birth-to-maturity chronology that has served American writers from Henry Adams to Norman Schwarzkopf. Erdrich’s use of story versions in which the details of what “really happened” change or are artfully rearranged can seem to compromise the truth-telling. For instance, having read “The Red Convertible,” the chapter that Lyman Lamartine narrates about his brother Henry’s suicide, a reader might dismiss Marie’s version of it, (described for us by her grandson Lipsha later in the book), as a false account: One time [says Lipsha] she told Gordie never to ride with a crazy Lamartine boy. She had seen something in the polished-up tin of her bread toaster. So he didn’t. Sure enough, the time came we heard how Lyman and Henry went out of control in their car, ending up in the river. Lyman swam to the top, but Henry never made it. (240)

But the third version of the story, part of a chapter narrated by Henry’s mother Lulu, offers a better clue about how to read these discrepancies. When Lyman returns from the river looking “almost half gone himself ” and announces that there has been “an accident,” Lulu tells him, “Don’t say nothing.” She knew, she tells the reader, “that no accident would have taken Henry junior’s life, not after he had the fortune to get through a war and a prison camp alive. But . . . I said nothing. I knew what people needed to believe” (288). The three versions of this story are more than mishandled rumors or the denial that comes from extreme grief. Using the same “facts,” the three narrators relate very different stories, each in a way that serves the narrator’s purpose and represents his/her self. Lyman’s “original” story is a memorial for his dead brother. Marie’s version, part of Lipsha’s tribute to his all-knowing grandmother, is not a story about Henry Lamartine at all; for Marie it is a story about Gordie, and for Lipsha it is a story about his powerful grandmother. Finally, Lulu sees Henry’s death as part of a larger pattern enveloping all of her “boys,” her dead husband Henry Senior, and her childhood encounter with a dead body in the woods. For her, Henry Junior’s death is only a small part of

12

E. Shelley Reid

the story of the Lamartines who “stuck together” through good times and bad (289). Accepting the notion that individuals and their community need more than one “truth” opens up a wide field for new stories about our selves. Indeed, the shifting lens of truth is perhaps more useful and representative of diverse American identities, Native and non-Native, than the stories we have gotten used to telling.4 Lastly, in addition to rewriting the Euro-American identity narrative paradigm of a single narrator presenting the one true story of his life, Erdrich also modifies the linear chronology so important to Rousseau and to many critical definitions of the genre. Thus the “accretive and achronological narrative” that Louis Owens describes as central to Native American storytelling (172) is the dominant mode of both Tracks and Love Medicine, despite the orderly lists of dates in their tables of contents. In Tracks, events from each year listed are described from at least two points of view, often within chapters headed by earlier or later dates. Just as frequently, single narrators slide easily through verb tenses, presenting the story as both immediate encounter and remembered history. In the case of Love Medicine, one senses that the dates at the top of each chapter (which do, excepting the first chapter, proceed chronologically) are landmarks added after the fact as a gesture of Western cohesiveness. They neither limit the events discussed within a chapter nor allow the direct comparisons between chapters that similar or sequential dates might imply. Thus “Lulu’s Boys” though dated 1957, ranges back through the events of nearly two decades, tying one story about the “boys” to another, building up a picture of a woman who by her own description is best represented by an accretive narrative: “I am a woman of detachable parts,” she tells Beverly Lamartine (115). At one point in the chapter the narrative whips through time as though chronological distinctions never existed: “Some men react in that situation [the strip poker game Lulu played with Beverly and his brother Henry twenty years earlier] and some don’t,” she told him. “It was reaction I looked for, if you know what I mean.” [past events] Beverly was silent. Lulu winked at him. . . . At the time [present], her hair was still dark and thickly curled. Later [ future] she would burn it off when her house caught fire, and it would never [ far future] grow back. Because her face was soft and yet alert [present], . . . Beverly had always [past] felt exposed, preyed on, undressed around her, even before the game in which she’d stripped him naked [past] and now [present], as he found, appraised him in his shame. (116)

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

13

In the chapter that follows, “The Plunge of the Brave,” also dated 1957, Nector Kashpaw shifts from past to present tense, and then after several pages shifts back to past tense without changing the date or the story he is relating, almost, in fact, without any interruption in the narrative at all. The night he spends with Lulu in 1952 is reenacted for us as a present-time event, as vivid in the narrative as it is in Nector’s memory: despite the passage of time suggested by the date at the top of the chapter, use of a linear chronology would actually disrupt the wholeness of the story and the web of connections that surrounds it. As Tavris suggests, the link between narrative style and self-concept is a strong one: Rousseau prepares his readers to appreciate a certain kind of (represented) self by announcing repeatedly that he is telling the whole truth, leaving no gaps and proceeding in a logical (by Western standards) order from the beginning of his life straight through to the end. Similarly, Erdrich uses elements of a narrative style strongly reminiscent of Native American oral traditions to provide a foundation for her revision of Western ideas of identity. The ability to avoid seeing “coherent” and “fragmented” (or “whole” and “multiple”) as mutually exclusive descriptions of an identity-focused narrative can transfer directly to an appreciation of the Native American concepts of identity that are at the heart of the novels. Thus Erdrich’s revisions extend from the narrative gestures into the very selves being represented; the selves in her texts, like the stories themselves, are interdependent, inclusive, and adaptable while still being whole and healthy. Just as some critics reading Love Medicine have found themselves unable simply to ignore or gloss over the text’s narrative fragmentation, readers of Native American literatures have often found themselves struggling to come to terms with the discontinuities and multiplicities of Native American identity. Several scholars, as discussed earlier, find the novels proof that contemporary Native writers face a host of dis-integrating cultural forces. Certainly, Native and non-Native observers alike have noted that the social realities of modern Native American life can be disruptive of a sense of identity. Yet as Brumble explains, readers looking for the highly individualistic self of Rousseau, Franklin, or Adams, even in the earliest Native American identity narratives, are likely to be frustrated in their readings: Adams and Rousseau are typical of modern autobiographers . . . in that they are aware of themselves as individuals, and in their complex awareness that they might have been otherwise. On the other hand, an Indian living in the old way had little sense of an individual self apart from the tribe or clan, little sense that he might have been a different self had he been born in a different lodge. (136)

14

E. Shelley Reid

Brumble notes that traditional Euro-American autobiographical gestures were transformed over the last century by this radically relational concept of identity. The identity narratives that emerge from the intersection, he concludes, need to be read “without a culture-bound insistence” on Western concepts of discrete individuality (182). Once again, the role of the storyteller as mediator is central, to identity as well as to narrative. As Allen explains, an Indian poetry must develop metaphors that will not only reflect the dual perceptions of Indian/non-Indian but will reconcile them. The ideal metaphor will harmonize the contradictions and balance them so that the internal equilibrium can be achieved, so that each perspective is meaningful, and in their joining psychic unity rather than fragmentation occurs. (161)

It is not, then, the multiplicity of perspectives or the cultural fragmentation itself that is destructive, but an inability to mediate the differences. Readers looking for clues to the psychic health and well-being of an individual in a Native American identity narrative thus need to look past the apparent state of cultural confusion to the way in which the character is harmonizing the multiple perspectives that have influence in her or his life. From a revised perspective, then, Erdrich’s novels are clearly identity narratives, despite their obvious departures from, and mediations of, Western autobiographical conventions of self-representation. The emphasis varies slightly in each text: Love Medicine, for example, explores personal and familial identity through its attempt to paint a picture of the absent June, while Tracks explores identity in a historical and tribal context. The web-like, “dreamcatcher” narrative form of each novel thus also reflects the model of identity that Erdrich seeks to represent: characters’ lives and selves are as mutable and inextricably woven together as their stories, and as gently bounded by the larger circles of tribal, historical, and geographical identification. To read Love Medicine as June Morrissey’s personal narrative is to begin to understand how Rousseau’s story of “simply myself ” (17) can be reorganized without losing the focus on fundamental identities. June’s death in the first chapter brings us immediately into the circle of people who are central to her sense of self. Robert Silberman explains this phenomenon as a “haunting,” and, still leaning on Euro-American relationship patterns, describes the characters’ interdependence as a matter of the responsibility of one discrete individual for another rather than a truly relational identity: Love Medicine could have been called “Who Killed June Kashpaw?” or “What Killed Her?” since the responsibility and guilt are shared by many individuals (104). Love Medicine is not fundamentally a book about blame or guilt; rather, it

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

15

is a series of attempts by Kashpaws, Nanapushes, and Lamartines to tell June’s story so that, like Albertine, they finally “felt the right way” about her (10). In doing so, they necessarily tell their own stories and those of other family members, sliding from one, thread to another across time and place until their own senses of identity are securely woven back together. Erdrich uses this healing process to explore the ways in which a “stable,” “individual” identity can be represented as multifaceted, mutable, and inextricably linked to family and tribe. As Owens points out, when we first meet June, as she is sharing brightly colored hard-boiled eggs with a nondescript mud engineer in an unremarkable local bar, her description fits a common Western paradigm. June’s sense of herself as fragile, ready to “crack wide open” (6) or “fall apart at the slightest touch,” with nothing solid underneath the white vinyl of her jacket (4), is familiar to many readers, according to Owens: In a Euramerican context it underscores June’s alienation, approaching schizophrenia, her loss of a centered identity” (195). But he explains that June’s initial appearance is also familiar to readers accustomed to more traditional Native American narratives, readers who are likely to see June’s “personal identity [as] entirely dependent upon a coherent cultural identity” (20): Fragmentation in Native American mythology is not necessarily a bad thing. . . . For the traditional cultural hero, the necessary annihilation of the self that prefigures healing and wholeness and a return to the tribal community often takes the form of physical fragmentation, bodily, as well as psychic deconstruction. (195)

When read in the Native American literary tradition that has chronicled Abel’s confusion in N. Scott Momaday’s House of Dawn and Tayo’s sense of loss in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, June’s self-less appearance in the opening of the novel paradoxically signals the reader to expect a text about the return to the wholeness of a culturally tuned sense of self. It signals, as clearly as Rousseau’s “simply myself ” or Frederick Douglass’s “I was born in Tuckahoe,” the start of an identity narrative. June’s death prevents her from telling her own story, though she has made the first gesture and is literally “going home” to the reservation when the blizzard overtakes her. Since her self comprises all the selves of her family and tribe, there is nothing unusual about hearing her story in their voices. Indeed, the recuperation of June’s identity begins immediately. Albertine’s formal introduction of June restores her to her whole “tribal” self, defined by Kenneth Lincoln as comprising “an extended family that reciprocates among people, places, history, flora and fauna, spirits and gods” (42). It also places her in relation to everyone else:

16

E. Shelley Reid

June was raised by Great-uncle Eli. . . . He’d taken her in when Grandma’s sister died and June’s no-good Morrissey Father ran off to high-time it in the Cities. . . . June decided on my uncle, Gordie Kashpaw, and married him even though they had to run away to do it. They were cousins, but almost like brother and sister. Grandma wouldn’t let them in the house for a year, she was so angry. (8)

Fragile or not, June had a family and a place in their lives, and thus a coherent, stable identity despite the pains and doubts of her daily life. Moreover, she is inextricably woven into the selves of the other characters; by demonstrating this, Erdrich allows readers to imagine the reverse process. That is, as we read all the other stories, we can piece together the self that June would have presented had she told her own (and thereby everyone else’s) life story. Tracks explores another axis of Native American identity, the connection of an individual with the history of his or her tribe. In the novel, the trickster/patriarch Nanapush narrates to young Lulu the story of the tribe’s struggles to survive in an attempt to give her back the identity she has lost while away at a government boarding school. More than just speaking the personal history of Lulu’s mother Fleur, Nanapush and Pauline tell stories about the connections of family, clan, and tribe. As readers we do not really meet Lulu in this novel (though we may “remember” her adult life from Love Medicine). But Tracks is as much an identity narrative for Lulu as Love Medicine is for June, providing the stories that will let her define herself historically as a product of tribal traditions and pressures from the white community, narrated and embodied by Nanapush and Pauline, respectively. Blood relations are not the crucial element in Tracks; in fact, as Pauline notes, Lulu’s “family” is artificially constructed, “a kind of clan, the new made up of bits of the old, some religious in the old way and some in the new” (70). In Tracks, rather, Erdrich presents the individual characters as coexistent with tribal history and mythology. It is impossible to separate the inscrutable Fleur from the tribal stories about the water-god Misshepeshu or to determine whether her strangeness is the cause or is the effect of the stories about her supernatural relationships. Nanapush, too, embodies the whole of tribal history and tradition: I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot. I trapped the last beaver with a pelt of more than two years’ growth. I spoke aloud the words of the government treaty, and refused to sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods and lake. I axed the last birch that was older than I, and I saved the last Pillager. (2)

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

17

His life story is the tribe’s life story; his adaptation to a new bureaucratic identity at the end of the novel literally and figuratively ensures the survival of the tribe, a tribe whose future is clearly tied to young Lulu’s self and story. Mitchell’s observations on the function of memory in Love Medicine are particularly pertinent to the situation of identity in Tracks: “each character’s relationship to the past—particularly an Indian [tribal] past—forms the core of his or her ability to deal effectively with the present, and to develop a coherent sense of self ” (166). In many ways, Tracks is indeed “only” a fictional narrative about a historical turning point for a Native American tribe. Yet in a mediated worldview that includes an expanded concept of the self, it is also an equal partner in the interconnected relational identity narrative begun in Love Medicine. Finally, in addition to broadening the scope of personal identity to include all the elements of a “tribe” that Lincoln names, both narratives describe an overarching community identity that values diversity and encourages adaptation among its own “detachable parts.” For Erdrich, the community’s ability to adapt is “one of the strengths of Indian culture, that you pick and choose and keep and discard” (“Whatever” 79). Thus Zelda can decide that her mixed-blood daughter Albertine is definitely an Indian, Pauline that she wants to be white like her Canadian grandfather, and Nanapush that he should learn how to function as a white government bureaucrat; none is judged to have made the “wrong” choice or is irrevocably cast out from the community.5 Indeed, Erdrich’s most lyrical and explicit description of a communal self suggests that the strongest communities are always multiple and mutable: Lulu’s boys had grown into a kind of pack. They always hung together. When a shot went true, their gangling legs, encased alike in faded denim, shifted as if a ripple went through them collectively. They moved in dance steps too intricate for the noninitiated eye to imitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of one part of one organism. (118)

Similarly, Nanapush emphasizes throughout Tracks that the tribal community comprises a number of individual organisms woven tightly together, in his metaphor, not into a web but into a “coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken” (2). Thus, as Schultz points out, Erdrich “answers, our implicit question of ‘What is it like to be Native American?’ by debunking the idea that there is such a thing as a Native American view, by helping us to acknowledge that there is not even a single Chippewa view”

18

E. Shelley Reid

(92). In contrast, while Franklin, Adams, and other conventional EuroAmerican autobiographers frequently associate themselves with the larger groups of community or nation, they are usually more concerned with narrowing the definition of “American” or “modern” than with opening up all its possibilities, thus again placing limits on the stories we live by. In a sense, we are back where we started. Erdrich’s representation of personal identity as a matter subject to change and revision is the natural consequence of the relational, interwoven identity she and other Native American authors and observers have described. If one strand of the web—be it a personal, tribal, or historical condition—alters its position, the others must adapt. Erdrich has found an and to replace the either/or of Euro-American conventions of identity: for her characters, continuity and change, historical and contemporary influences, individuality and interrelation are of equal importance. As Joy Harjo succinctly notes, “All persons are still their own entity, but not separate from everything else” (92). Debra Holt infers from this conclusion that “value judgments, so easily arrived at in the Western tradition, have no place [in Erdrich’s novels],” and decides that the reader is thus prevented from reaching a “final truth” (151). She is partially correct; the Native American perspectives that Erdrich explores require a kind of deconstructive logic in which each reader comes to a conclusion somewhere between the binary terminal points, and no two readers are likely to come to the same “final truth.” However, Holt overlooks the investment that Erdrich entices readers to make. Far from being prevented from making judgments, Erdrich’s readers play a key role in constructing and arranging the identities and stories of the novels, with Erdrich’s text as a model and guide. Indeed, Kathleen Sands argues that in Love Medicine, [i]t is the reader who is . . . forced to shift position, turn, ponder, and finally integrate the story into a coherent whole by recognizing the indestructible connections between the characters and events of [Erdrich’s] narrative(s). Hence the novel places the reader in a paradoxically dual stance, simultaneously on the fringe of the story yet at the very center of the process—distant and intimate, passive yet very actively involved in the narrative process. (12)

Erdrich understands that the best way to modify the conventions of the identity narrative is to include the reader in that process: the “gaps” become invitations for the reader to weave himself or herself into the narrative web of identity and to participate in the struggle for cultural survival and continuity. As Sands comments, in the fragmented (but not, as we have seen, inexplicably so) narrative of a novel like Love Medicine, “no individual [is] privy

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

19

to the whole story,” with the exception, in this case, of the reader (15). As readers, we are given access to numerous pieces of information, some of them, like the thoughts that cross June’s mind the night of her death, revealed only to us. Moreover, in addition to inducting readers into the tribal community, Erdrich’s adaptation of oral narrative, techniques—fragmentation and repetition, circularity and interconnectedness—helps teach us how best to construct identities for the characters and communities in her novels. Erdrich thus makes her readers into the mediators, a process that James Ruppert sees as essential for cross-cultural communication: [t]he text will effectively need to teach any reader how to read the work, and, thus, how to perceive new evoked realities and new modes of knowledge. A non–Native American reader could be taught to read the text in a synechronistic, nonrational matter. . . . The Native American reader could be encouraged to see not only a mythic dimension, but also a linear dimension including rationalist Western tradition. . . . The reader would be required to reconstruct the discourse of mediation that is the text. He [or she], too, must mediate. (223)

Love Medicine and Tracks both demonstrate their intention to be identity narratives—stories are told in the first-person, events are linked to selfdiscovery, characters reflect on who they are and where they belong—and require the reader to construct identity within the circular, interconnected pattern common to Native American cultures. And importantly, while a reader who has some knowledge of Native American literary and cultural traditions is more prepared for the gaps in the texts, Erdrich’s novels make appreciable efforts to “teach any reader how to read the work,” even those readers who are largely unfamiliar with Native American cultures. Although Love Medicine has been criticized for having a narrative line too complex and thus inaccessible (Mengelkoch 135), its complexity proves instructional in several ways. For instance, the very unfamiliarity of the narrative style and self-concept are useful; Allen explains that they can serve to alert the reader to his or her own ignorance, thus preventing any quick cultural generalizations or appropriations, and perhaps even encouraging readers to learn more about the culture.6 Even if readers don’t choose to learn more, Owens notes that there is a subtle switch in cultural roles that can give the reader, now an outsider, a necessary appreciation of a Native American point of view (14). However, Erdrich’s narratives are more inviting than distancing. As Schultz explains, by not using a narrator to mediate or edit the text, Erdrich

20

E. Shelley Reid

“encourages us as readers to find that relational viewpoint, to learn to think as her characters think” (91). Thus if the characters do not find the gaps and disjunctions intolerable, and there is no narrator to say otherwise, readers can learn an acceptance of the dreamcatcher narrative approach even without any formal study of it. By enlisting readers’ participation, Erdrich expands our definitions of both identity and identity narrative. She thus takes her place as a literary mediator, teaching us how to recognize the validity of other stories about selves as a first step toward rethinking the stories we have told and will tell. Such revision is a very long process. Perhaps the self is such a complicated entity, with each one different from the next, that a series of conventions and signs is necessary to allow us to communicate with our selves to each other. Within a single discourse community, this is feasible: once people understand what the signs represent, they come to expect that a certain combination of textual gestures metonymically present an Other self on a printed page. It is necessary, one might argue, to sacrifice some flexibility in presentation for the opportunity to feel that we have communicated at some fundamental level with another human being. In the case of self representation, however, an insistence on a single set of markers and textual conventions can place limits that are too severe, limits that prevent communication, especially between people from different discourse communities and different cultures. Since the stories we tell are so closely linked with the people we become, a strict set of contracts and rules can make it more difficult to imagine becoming or understanding somebody Other. It may be more useful to see identity narratives as part of a negotiation between writer and audience, with possibilities for alterations as each side alters its perspectives and goals. The implications of such mutability for readers of ethnic and minority American literatures are many. First, it puts us on alert. If the stories we tell about ourselves can be changed, they probably have been changed; we need to be able to recognize the gestures that writers have chosen to adopt from Euro-American traditions, as well as the ways in which they have modified the normative gestures, if we are to be successful readers of their selves/texts. In Erdrich’s case, recognizing the validity of multifaceted narratives and selves helps us see her texts as documenting the survival and cultural successes of contemporary Native Americans, not as mourning the passing of once-great cultures. Such efforts will also be valuable in reading other contemporary writers, from Toni Morrison and Amy Tan to Sandra Cisneros and Sherman Alexie. Moreover, seeing the successful working-out of these revised identity narratives may help Americans escape the limitations of an individualistic selfconcept that worried Bellah and his associates. None of us, white Americans included, is living in Rousseau’s world. In late twentieth-century America it

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

21

may thus no longer be as personally, culturally, or nationally necessary to define ourselves as unified, discrete individuals operating on smooth timelines of progress. It may not, in fact, be feasible or even possible to continue to tell or rely on only that kind of story. In working to ensure the survival of contemporary Native American stories and cultures, and in making an alternative set of stories available for our consideration, Erdrich may help a broad cross-section of Americans adapt our concepts and stories of identity—and so survive to tell our whole, complex selves to the generations that follow us.

No t e s 1. For a comprehensive exploration of one facet of this diversity, an emphasis on community rather than individual identity, see TuSmith. 2. While Erdrich often shies away from being labeled a minority writer, she still sees herself as a participant in Native American writers’ special efforts to claim identity and ensure cultural survival: “Contemporary Native American writers have . . . a task quite different from that of other writers I’ve mentioned. In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors, while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe” (“Where I Ought to Be” 23). 3. Vizenor explains that this principle is valid for the Chippewa/Anishinaabeg culture that is part of Erdrich’s heritage and her characters’ lives: “The Anishinaabeg did not have written histories; their world views were not linear narratives that started and stopped in manifest binaries” (24). 4. Another manifestation of Erdrich’s story versions is the publication of a second edition of Love Medicine, described on the title page as a “new and expanded version” of the text. While the publishing blurb on the back cover calls it “equivalent to the presentation of a new and definitive text,” Erdrich’s new version does what her characters’ story versions do: it undermines definitiveness, instead emphasizing the fluidity of an infinite number of context- and narrator-dependent variations. 5. “Identity,” writes Cherokee poet Rayna Green, “is never simply a matter of genetic make-up or natural birthright. Perhaps once, long ago, it was both. But not now. For people out on the edge, out on the road, identity is a matter of will, a matter of choice, a face to be shaped in ceremonial act” (7). 6. Allen points out that early translator-editors of Native American literature who reworked the material to more closely mirror familiar Western structures did the literature a great disservice by eliding the cultural differences. Explaining the difference between her uncle John Gunn’s revisions of Keres legends and E. C. Parsons’ more literal translations of Laguna and Pueblo stories, she says: When Uncle John puts the stuff into a structure, immediately the reader looks at the structure and says, “Oh, I recognize this.” And the reader, the Western reader, should not be saying, “I recognize this.” Believe me, if that’s what readers are saying, they’re making a terrible mistake. . . . [w]hat Parsons does . . . is she gets so completely confused about what’s going on, it shows. And as a result, you know that you don’t understand and that’s the truth. You don’t understand. (Coltelli 25).

22

E. Shelley Reid

Wor k s Ci t e d Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986. Bellah, Robert N., et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Coltelli, Laura. “Paula Gunn Allen.” Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. 11–39. Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New and Expanded ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. ——— . Tracks. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. ——— . “Whatever is Really Yours: An Interview with Louise Erdrich.” Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Ed. Joseph Bruchac. Tucson: Sun Tracks and University of Arizona Press, 1987. 73–86. ——— . “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place.” New York Times Book Review 28 July 1985: 1, 23–24. Green, Rayna, ed. That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 28–48. Harjo, Joy. “The Story of All Our Survival: An Interview With Joy Harjo.” Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Ed. Joseph Bruchac. Tucson: Sun Tracks and University of Arizona Press, 1987. 87–103. Holt, Debra C. “Transformation and Continuance: Native American Tradition in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” Entering the 90s: The North American Experience. Ed. Thomas E. Schirer. Sault Ste. Marie: Lake Superior State University Press, 1991. 149–161. Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “The Ambivalent American: Asian American Literature on the Cusp.” Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. 13–32. Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Mengelkoch, Louise. “Rejection and Renewal: The Theme of Alienation in the Writings of Five Mixedblood Word Warriors.” Entering the 90s: The North American Experience. Ed. Thomas E. Schirer. Sault Ste. Marie: Lake Superior State University Press, 1991. 134–148. Mitchell, David. “A Bridge to the Past: Cultural Hegemony and the Native American Past in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Entering the 90s: The North American Experience. Ed. Thomas E. Schirer. Sault Ste. Marie: Lake Superior State University Press, 1991. 162–170. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. 1781. Trans. J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1953. Ruppert, James. “Meditation and Multiple Narrative in Contemporary Native American Fiction.” Texas Studies on Language and Literature 28.2 (1986): 209–225.

The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives

23

Sands, Kathleen M. “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9.1 (1985): 12–24. Schultz, Lydia A. “Fragments and Ojibwe Stories: Narrative Strategies in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” College Literature 18.3 (1991): 80–95. Silberman, Robert. “Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman.” Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. 101–120. Tavris, Carol. The Mismeasure of Woman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Tedlock, Dennis. “The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in American Indian Religion.” Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations. Ed. Karl Kroeber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. 45–64. TuSmith, Bonnie. All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Vizenor, Gerald. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Woodward, Pauline Groetz. “New Tribal Forms: Community in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction.” Diss. Tufts University, 1991.

Ack now l e d gme n t I wish to thank Eric Anderson, William Fischer, Joy Ried, and Mark Sheckner for their assistance with earlier drafts of this article.

F rederick E . H o x ie

“Thinking Like an Indian”: Exploring American Indian Views of American History

I

n a recent collection of essays by Native American academics, historian Donald Fixico declared that “obtaining a tribal viewpoint, a Native feeling, and the other side of history, and then thinking like an Indian and putting yourself in that other position, is mandatory for teaching and writing a balanced history of Indian-white relations.”1 No modern scholar would argue with that statement. As Fixico himself acknowledged elsewhere in his essay, the call for a “tribal viewpoint” has been a central concern of American historians writing about Native Americans at least since Wilcomb Washburn’s 1957 call for a “moral history of Indian-white relations.”2 Fixico would also find a sympathetic audience among historians who work in other aspects of the national past. “Putting yourself in that other position”—imagining the object of history as its subject—has preoccupied historians of immigrants, women, African-Americans, and working people for at least as long as it has engaged the attention of American Indian scholars. But as a Native American scholar, Fixico states the case with special poignancy. For him—and for many other historians from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds—the academic effort to re-cast American history from the perspective of marginalized actors has fallen short. Fixico’s invitation to adopt a tribal perspective and “think like an Indian” is not new—or unique—but its meaning is not self-evident. How exactly is Reviews in American History, Volume 29, Number 1 (March 2001): pp. 1–14. Copyright © 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

25

26

Frederick E. Hoxie

one to “think like an Indian?” Do Indians “think” about history in a uniform way? And if so, does that “thinking” determine a “tribal viewpoint?” Is there an “Indian” viewpoint regarding American history? If so, how do we identify it? Anthropologists and literary scholars have often argued that despite the diversity of native cultures in North America, the values on which those traditional lifeways have rested frequently overlap. That position is most persuasive for the precontact communities that flourished across the continent prior to 1492.3 Moving into the era of European expansion and native resistance—centuries of disease, warfare, displacement, migration, and dramatic cultural transformation—the argument for a single native viewpoint is more difficult to sustain. Here is where describing the process of “thinking like an Indian” becomes difficult. It would seem difficult to define a single “tribal perspective” on the complex events of the past 500 years. What then does Fixico’s plea mean for those who attempt to respond to the mandate that they “think like an Indian” when writing history? What follows here are some tentative answers to this question. Responding to Fixico’s call is difficult, but we occupy a moment when unraveling what it means to “think like an Indian” is a crucial undertaking. The task is both compelling and threatening. Compelling because it challenges our fundamental belief that the historical imagination can encompass the experiences of all peoples. Threatening because it exposes historians who make the attempt to attack from all sides of the professional battlefield. Academic traditionalists concerned about affirmative action in the academy and the proliferation of what they perceive as self-serving “studies” programs charge that there are no “perspectives” in “real” history, just facts. And, they might add, Indians “think” like everyone else. From another quarter come advocates of a nationalist scholarship who reject attempts by outsiders to understand their point of view or who retreat to a separate academic universe that argues for a Native American history (or Asian American or other similar particular histories) that is unique and therefore unrelated to other aspects of the national experience. They might argue that Indians “think” like no one else. Thinking historically about “thinking like an Indian” might provide a pathway through these difficult issues. At first glance, defining how Native Americans “think” about history, particularly American history, would appear to be an exercise in the obvious. American Indians have been systematically dispossessed and demeaned for five centuries. Throughout this period native people have generally resisted and rejected European culture. It would seem that Old Lodge Skins, Thomas Berger’s fictional Cheyenne elder in Little Big Man had it right when he summarized his view of people from Europe in a conversation with the novel’s narrator. The old man shook his head and declared, “White people are crazy.” What more is there to say than that?â•›4

“Thinking Like an Indian”

27

Actually, a good deal more. Native people, no less than Europeans, have had a variety of reactions to newcomers and strangers and have understood the history of their interactions with newcomers in a variety of ways. American Indian views of American history have also grown more complex over time as initial understandings have given way to new experiences and native communities have altered their locations, shifted political allegiances, and created new traditions. As one begins to explore American Indian narratives of American history one is struck immediately by the relationship between those narratives and the authors’ definitions of their relationship to the national culture. Native American views of the United States are related to American Indian peoples’ definition of themselves as both members of indigenous cultures and as residents (and, in the twentieth century, as citizens) of the United States. People who defined themselves as “outsiders” to American culture tended to view American history as both alien and unpredictable; those who felt themselves positioned differently—either as marginals or as members of the larger society—did not. An outline of the major features of the Native American view of American history should help illustrate this relationship between the shifting nature of American Indian identity and the structure of Native American historical narratives. I The first extended indigenous historical narrative regarding the encounter between Euro-Americans and Native Americans emerged from the religious and political upheavals of the late eighteenth century when a series of visionary prophets mobilized their communities to resist Anglo-American expansion into the Ohio valley. Neolin, a Delaware teacher whose home lay in eastern Ohio not far from the frontier trading post of Pittsburgh, was the first of these prophets whose careers can be documented. Described in early accounts from the 1760s as a young man, Neolin based his preaching on a vision that had convinced him that Indian people should separate themselves from all trappings of European culture. As part of his ministry, Neolin distributed a pictographic chart to his followers that represented white people in the form of a black box that stood between earth-bound Indians and the heavenly realm above them. The box symbolized the white man’s evil gifts: drink, avarice and over-hunting. According to Neolin whites were a disruptive and dangerous presence in an otherwise harmonious world.5 Neolin’s chart made it clear that he and his followers believed white people and Indians represented separate orders of being. Searching for native allies in the struggle to resist the English and the Americans and eager to identify common ground among divided and competing groups of Delawares, Miamis, Iroquois, Ojibwes, Ottawas, Shawnees and others, Neolin called for Indian unity. He argued that despite tribal and linguistic differences, Native

28

Frederick E. Hoxie

Americans had more in common with each other than they could ever have with the alien and evil race that had come from east of the mountains. Neolin called on his followers to reject European technology and trade goods (especially alcohol) and to make that renunciation public by participating in a ceremony that involved taking a special emetic that caused participants to vomit up any white poisons that remained within them. A generation later, Tecumseh’s brother, the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, carried Neolin’s message and the call for pan-Indian resistance to a confederacy of tribes gathered in Indiana. Tenskwatawa shared Neolin’s view that whites and Indians had been created separately. He told his followers that the Master of Life had assured him during a great vision: “The Americans I did not make. They are not my children but the children of the Evil Spirit. . . . They grew from the scum of the great water when it was troubled by the Evil Spirit. And the froth was driven into the woods by a strong east wind. They are numerous, but I hate them.”6 His message would be a crucial element in forging the anti-American alliance that fought valiantly but unsuccessfully alongside the British in the War of 1812. (A version of the Shawnee’s teaching was carried to the Creeks of Georgia and Alabama and probably played a role in the Red Stick rebellion that took place shortly thereafter.) A third prophet of this era, the Seneca Handsome Lake, reported having a dramatic vision in 1799; he preached his message throughout the Iroquois world until his death in 1815. While Handsome Lake did not advocate armed struggle against whites, his historical outlook resembled that of his two colleagues: Indian people are a separate order of being; they must return to their ancient virtues, reject alcohol, and avoid European technology. Handsome Lake’s teachings also contained a unique element, a preamble that placed his teachings in a complex historical narrative. Handsome Lake began his lesson by tracing the origins of the strife that had engulfed the Indians living on the frontiers of the new American nation. It began, “a long time ago and across the great salt sea . . . that stretches east.” In this land of white people, a young “preacher” discovered a castle of gold ruled by a lord who gave him “five gifts” and instructed him to send those gifts across the ocean to a “virtuous” and “honest” people who had no “unnatural habits.” The lord promised the gifts would make the virtuous people “as white men are” and after they had been sent across the sea the young man would become “chief of all the great preachers.” The young priest peeked at the five gifts and thought it a bit odd that they were a flask of rum, playing cards, a handful of coins, a violin and a decayed leg bone (representing the effects of syphilis), but he remembered his promise to the great lord, so he set off in search of someone to deliver the gifts across the sea. Eventually he found a man named Columbus to whom he entrusted the gifts. After Columbus’s voyage, the five gifts were spread to the New World; misery followed. Only then was it clear that the

“Thinking Like an Indian”

29

gifts had come not from the creator but from the evil one. It had all been a trick and the eager young preacher had been a fool to believe the great lord. According to Handsome Lake, the creator finally took pity on the people of North America and so sent four messengers to bring him the vision that was the basis of the Seneca prophet’s teaching. Based on the wisdom of the four messengers, Handsome Lake’s lessons promised to deliver his fellow tribesmen from the evil inflicted by the five gifts.7 The message of these three visionaries was clear: Indian people and white people shared no common history. European culture was the birthplace of sorcery and evil; those who preached the goodness of Christianity or European culture were, like the young priest in Handsome Lake’s story, the victims of a devilish deception. Citizens of the United States were therefore defined as incomprehensible and evil; there were no points at which the lives of the two races overlapped. Native American history, on the other hand, rested on a set of common origins and a set of common values. This outlook, which historian Gregory Evans Dowd has called “nativist,” characterized much of the prophetic teaching that emerged from the violent border conflicts of the early nineteenth century. II In 1831, while Handsome Lake’s teachings were finding receptive audiences among the Iroquois peoples of western New York and the Shawnee prophet (forced west by the Americans) was settling into a new home near modern Kansas City, another American Indian visionary told his life story and embarked on a similar campaign of teaching and conversion. William Apess’s A Son of the Forest carried a stinging indictment of American avarice and deception, but its author viewed both himself and his white tormenters from a different perspective than the nativist prophets of the Ohio and Alabama frontiers. Apess grew up in a world where the borders between whites and Indians could not be drawn with clarity. His father was the son of a white man and an Indian woman, and his childhood was spent travelling between Indian and white settlements in southern New England. Unlike the nativist prophets, he declared that all people shared a common origin. For him, ancestry meant nothing. “I consider myself nothing more than a worm of the earth,” he declared.8 But the Apess revealed in A Son of the Forest was no less a visionary than Neolin or Handsome Lake. Growing up as an indentured servant in white households, the young Pequot was curious about Christianity and increasingly preoccupied with his own shortcomings. He was drawn to what he referred to as the “noisy Methodists,” both because of their emotional services—”people shouted for joy while sinners wept”—and because they were persecuted by his upper-class employers.9 The Methodists’ democratic culture and lack of

30

Frederick E. Hoxie

formal doctrine finally won him over. For a lonely, frightened child separated from his parents and their traditions, the promise of Christian redemption provided a way of ordering the world. “I felt convinced that Christ died for all mankind,” Apess wrote, “that age, sect, color, country, or situation made no difference. I felt an assurance that I was included in the plan of redemption with all my brethren. No one can conceive with what joy I hailed this new doctrine.”10 Echoing the antislavery voices of his day, Apess used what he took to be the central message of Christianity—“Christ died for all mankind”—to establish a moral yardstick against which he could measure the behavior of his fellow Americans. His conversion armed him with a moral language he used to position himself as a Native American in a world ruled by outsiders. Cut off from his own tribal traditions and engulfed by an indifferent white community, Apess shared many of the conditions facing the Senecas or Shawnees. But he did not take the nativist path of Handsome Lake or Tenskwatawa. Rather than dismiss whites as inscrutable devils, he condemned them in their own tongue: They were sinners, people who did not live up to their ideals. “How much better it would be if the whites would act like civilized people,” he declared.11 William Apess offered his most sustained commentary on American history in his “Eulogy on King Philip,” a widely reprinted speech he delivered in Boston in 1836 at the height of the controversy surrounding the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. The “Eulogy” was a defense of the seventeenth-century Pokanoket/Wampanoag leader’s patriotism and, by implication, an attack on the patriotic hero—Andrew Jackson—who now stood poised to dispossess thousands of southeastern Indians from their homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Apess mocked the president’s self-serving proclamations. According to the Pequot preacher, Jackson was really saying to the Indians, “You must go, even if the lions devour you, for we promised the land you have to somebody else long ago. . . . and we did it without your consent, it is true. But this has been the way our fathers first brought us up.”12 Apess’s moralistic reading of history led him to an apocalyptic conclusion. The evil of racial hatred must be eradicated from the nation so that everyone—Indian and white—might be free. “We want trumpets that sound like thunder,” Apess declared, calling people to “go to war with those corrupt and degrading principles that rob one of all rights merely because he is ignorant and of a little different color. Let us have principles that will give everyone his due; and then shall wars cease. . . . What do the Indians want?” he asked rhetorically, “you have only to look at the unjust laws made for them and say, ‘they want what I want.’”13

“Thinking Like an Indian”

31

III The nativist and moralist views of American history dominated Native American thinking and writing about the national past for a century after William Apess’s speech. Community leaders like Tecumseh and Neolin who sought to forge multitribal alliances frequently resorted to the nativist view. They argued that Indians and whites had nothing in common and that American behavior could not be explained or altered. Sitting Bull represents the most dramatic example of a nineteenth-century intertribal leader who relied on nativist ideas to explain his predicament and inspire his followers. Relying on visionary experiences that indicated spiritual helpers would deliver them from the Americans’ relentless advance, the Hunkpapa holy man rallied a collection of northern plains hunting peoples to his cause. His rhetorical and religious stance lay behind his military prowess and played a central role in his victories over American forces in the 1870s.14 Despite the continuing nativist tradition in American Indian life, few of the nativist leaders expressed themselves in print. Nativist interpretations of tribal experience and American history remained within Indian communities, communicated orally to enlist new followers and to extend the influence of visionary leaders. They entered the printed literature through the efforts of anthropologists. James Mooney sought out Wovoka only a few years after his initial vision and at a time when his followers were still active in Oklahoma and on the Plains. His record of the Paiute prophet’s vision was the first such account to be published. Handsome Lake’s teachings, while actively studied and celebrated among Iroquois people, were compiled and published in 1913 through the efforts of the Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker. These texts were gradually joined over the next several decades by scholarly studies of other visionary leaders. Until well into the twentieth century, Native American accounts of American history that found their way into print generally followed the moralistic model established by William Apess. These included the widely reprinted speeches of and statements of Black Hawk, Geronimo, Red Cloud, Sarah Winnemucca, and Chief Joseph. Speaking generally in the wake of a military defeat, these leaders called on white Americans to view their history in moral rather than racial terms and to see American Indians as fellow human beings rather than as barriers to civilization.15 The writer who developed this moralistic view of American history most fully in the century after Apess was Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux physician who became a popular author and lecturer in the decades surrounding World War I. Eastman published ten books of stories and autobiographical sketches between 1902 and 1920 while operating a popular summer camp and travelling widely on behalf of the YMCA and the Society of American Indians. The product of mission schools, Eastman shared Apess’s view that

32

Frederick E. Hoxie

Indians and whites shared a common humanity. Far less doctrinaire than the Pequot preacher, however, Eastman referred to the Creator in general terms and he avoided linking his message to the cause of Christian missionaries. Eastman’s reading of American history is most clearly evident in From the Deep Woods to Civilization, an autobiography published in 1916. The book purported to describe a young man’s “rise” from a boyhood in the wilderness to the author’s prosperous adulthood as a member of civilized society. On the surface this is the case: A young boy is called from the woods by his relatives who have converted to Christianity. He becomes a star pupil, a college student, a physician, an important public figure. But Eastman’s narrative voice makes clear that his journey marked the passage from faith to disillusionment. Civilization, he discovered, had no moral compass. As a physician, Eastman treated survivors of the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota; as a lobbyist for his tribe he witnessed corruption in Washington, D.C.; as a civil servant he experienced the cruelty of the Indian Office bureaucracy; and as an educated Native American, he felt the racism white Americans routinely displayed towards nonwhite people. The message of his journey was clear. Indian culture was more virtuous than civilization. As he wrote, “morality and spirituality are found to thrive better under the simplest conditions than in a highly organized society.” Consequently, the “democracy and community life” of American Indians was traditionally “much nearer the ideal than ours to-day. . . . Behind the material and intellectual splendor of our civilization,” Eastman argued, “primitive savagery and cruelty and lust hold sway.”16 Eastman’s moralistic perspective reflected the progressive political activism of his day. His critical but ultimately reformist view—that Indian values could inspire humanistic reforms of industrial American society—was picked up by other writers of his generation. Arthur Parker, Francis La Flesche, and Carlos Montezuma differed with Eastman on various policy issues, but they shared his belief that Native Americans had something to teach the American majority. Perhaps most outspoken was Zitkala Ša, a Yankton Sioux writer who published short stories in Atlantic Monthly and other popular magazines and criticized missionaries and school masters for their failure to recognize Indian traditions. IV A final view of American history emerged in aftermath of World War I when two broad historical processes crossed paths. First, social theorists—anthropologists, sociologists, educators and legal scholars—began to dismantle the progressive ideology that had dominated thinking about American nationalism since the first days of the republic. Rather than envisioning society as a homogeneous collection of individuals, each one protected by a set of

“Thinking Like an Indian”

33

legally protected rights, these new “social scientists” began to describe society as a collection of communities shaped by tradition, economic structure, ethnicity, or social institutions. At the same time, the first generation of American Indians began to emerge from American colleges and universities. While often products of a missionary education, these people looked beyond a religious or moralistic explanation for American history. Most prominent among the Indian intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s was D’Arcy McNickle. McNickle’s grandparents were Canadian Crees who fled south to the Flathead reservation in Montana in the aftermath of the 1885 Riel rebellion. Raised on the Flathead, McNickle attended the University of Montana before leaving in 1925 to study in Europe and, later, to seek his fortune as a freelance writer and novelist in New York City. In 1936 McNickle published his autobiographical novel, The Surrounded, and joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs, working as a liaison officer between an ambitious group of New Deal reformers in Washington, D.C., and tribal leaders on the reservations. He continued to write as his work carried him across the United States and demonstrated for him how poorly Indians and whites understood each other’s cultures. The experience convinced him that the barriers between Indians and whites were not racial or moral, but cultural. After World War II McNickle witnessed the onset of decolonization and began to understand the experiences of Native Americans in global terms. “Indians saw their history extending beyond tribal limits,” he wrote, “sharing the world experience of other native peoples subjected to colonial domination.” The solution to this situation, the way to narrow the gap between Indians and whites, was to extend the process of decolonization to the United States: to give Native American communities the right to function as independent entities. McNickle put it this way: “Return the right of decision to the tribes—restore their power to hold the dominant society at arm’s length, and to bargain again in peace and friendship. Only by possessing such power can the tribes make useful choices within the social environment encompassing them.”17 In 1949 McNickle published a history of American Indians in the United States, the first comprehensive history written by a Native American. They Came Here First contained descriptions of the diverse and ingenious peoples who had lived in the Americas before 1492. He described native legal systems and religious beliefs and reviewed the history of contact and European expansion. “What the Europeans could not appreciate,” he noted, “was that they had come face to face with customs, beliefs, habits—cultures—which had been some thousands of years in the forming. Whether these were inferior or superior was inconsequential; they had grown out of an antiquity of their own.”18 This ignorance produced what he called, “The Indian War That Never Ends.”

34

Frederick E. Hoxie

D’Arcy McNickle represents an anti-colonial approach to American history. Writing from a secular perspective rather than a religious or moralistic one, McNickle and those who followed his lead, identified a number of American characteristics that defined the national experience: cultural chauvinism, environmental exploitation, and bureaucratic inertia. Rooted in cultural misunderstanding and political ambition, American behavior must be altered, McNickle argued, so that native people might govern themselves like other citizens. In a manifesto drafted for a national Indian congress in 1961 McNickle brought this point home by connecting Native American concerns to the concerns of the then-emerging Third World: What we ask is not charity, not paternalism, even when benevolent. We ask only that the nature of our situation be recognized and made the basis of policy and action. . . . the Indians ask for assistance, technical and financial, . . . to regain in the America of the space age some measure of the adjustment they enjoyed as the original possessors of their native land.19

Like Apess and Eastman, McNickle saw a future for American Indians within the United States, but that future would require more than the acceptance of native morality by Christian whites. It would require a restructuring of American democracy. V By the 1970s, when Indian activists protesting federal inaction began commandeering television screens while small armies of white and Native American lawyers launched assaults on the nation’s antiquated policy apparatus, there were three distinctive strains of historical writing from which Indian analysts could draw as they sought to make sense of the national past. There has been such an explosion of creative scholarship in the past generation that it would be foolish to claim that all of it follows neatly the patterns established over the previous two centuries. Nevertheless, if one focuses on the writing of Native Americans alone, there is an interesting congruence between these three inherited perspectives—nativist, moralist, and anticolonial—and a great deal of contemporary writing. Three examples will have to make this case. Ward Churchill, who describes himself as a member of the American Indian Movement and a member of the Keetowah Band of the Cherokee Tribe, is both a political activist and an academic historian (he is a professor at the University of Colorado). While ranging over many topics, from environmental destruction to the antiradical programs of the FBI, he has been an insistent advocate of labeling American Indian history as the story

“Thinking Like an Indian”

35

of a holocaust. “From most of the history of what has happened,” he writes, “the perpetrators, from aristocrats like Jeffrey Amherst to the lowliest private in his army, from the highest elected officials to the humblest of farmers, openly described America’s indigenous peoples as vermin, launched literally hundreds of campaigns to effect their extermination, and then reveled in the carnage which resulted.” As a consequence of this sustained effort, he concludes, “The American holocaust was and remains unparalleled.”20 Like the nativist leaders of the nineteenth century, Churchill insists his historical conclusions support his political commitment. He declares “American Indians, demonstrably one of the most victimized groups in the history of humanity, are entitled to every ounce of moral authority we can get.” In addition, Churchill charges that American leaders have been perpetrators of a holocaust and deniers of its reality. Officials have denied their guilt and manipulated government agencies to shield them from prosecution for their crimes. Americans, he asserts, have created a “New World Order” that “promises to institutionalize genocide as an instrument of state power.” Using heavily footnoted texts rather than visionary journeys, Churchill offers a relentless indictment of American action that one can nevertheless imagine as a black image on Neolin’s drawing of the road to heaven. The enemies of indigenous people share nothing with native communities; loyal Indians should join with each other under a single leadership, rejecting compromise with white leaders or involvement with American institutions. The most dominant Native American intellectual of the past generation has been Vine Deloria, Jr., author of the best-selling Custer Died For Your Sins, first published in 1969, and more than a dozen other works of history and commentary. Deloria’s attention has shifted successively from white misconceptions and stereotypes to radical activism to moral philosophy to the value of traditional native epistemology; it is therefore quite difficult (and probably unwise) to characterize neatly his complex point of view. Yet when one isolates his historical writing, his anti-colonial approach comes sharply into view. From the outset of his career as a public figure, Deloria insisted that non-Indians understand that Native Americans were not interested in “civil rights.” Instead, he argued, “The modern Indian movement for national recognition has its roots in the tireless resistance of generations of unknown Indians who have refused to melt into the homogeneity of American life and accept American citizenship.” The goal of this movement was not to win acceptance from the white majority, but to restore treaties as the basis for relations between tribes and the government. Such a restoration would involve recognizing American Indian communities as independent, political sovereigns. In Deloria’s view, the revival of political activism that he had witnessed and participated in during the 1960s and 1970s was an American version of

36

Frederick E. Hoxie

the anti-colonial struggle that swept the globe in the generation after World War II: “The Third World ideology which proved so useful to Europeans in interpreting the events of the world . . . seemed to be fulfilling itself in North America as well as in Africa and Asia.”21 While not among the Indian radicals who occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in 1972 or took over the crossroads settlement of Wounded Knee in 1973, Deloria defended those actions because they demonstrated that Native Americans sought more than “fairness” or cultural sensitivity. “The pressing need today,” Deloria wrote in 1974, “is that the United States not only recognize the international status of the Indian tribes, . . . but that it also authorize the creation of a special court to settle treaty violations.” As political passions cooled in the 1980s and 1990s, Deloria continued to insist that sovereignty, not civil rights, should be the objective of Indian leaders. “A change in perception by both Indians and federal and state officials who deal with Indians is imperative if any substantial progress is to be achieved in the future. . . . It is probably too late,” Deloria concluded, “to put the Indian genie back into the bottle.”22 From Deloria’s perspective, the history of the United States resembled the history of any other imperial power. Gradually expanding its power over native communities, the federal government had implemented a series of authoritarian policies designed to justify and defend its seizure of Indian land and resources. American officials were not particularly immoral or especially unusual. “Exploration and settlement required a good deal of intellectual effort,” Deloria wrote with his tongue fixed firmly in his cheek. “The Europeans were equal to the occasion” and they developed an approach “which, naturally, gave them all the advantages.” American expansion, then, was carried out for selfish reasons and the treaties tribes signed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are an artifact of that process. But despite their colonial heritage, these treaties to Deloria are an important badge of Indian sovereignty, for they carry with them a recognition of the Indians’ “residual right of political existence.” It is this link between American history and contemporary treaty rights that defines Deloria’s anti-colonial stance.23 Finally, during the course of the past twenty-five years a courageous community of Native American scholars has entered the American academy; many of them are historians. Within the group are specialists in women’s history, colonial America, federal Indian policy, Indian law, and western history. Like William Apess and Charles Eastman, these authors speak from within American society. Teaching and writing for non-Indians as well as Native Americans, these scholars do not draw the dividing lines so evident in the work of more radical figures. They are also reluctant to embrace the larger theoretical framework of colonialism (and its modern incarnation, subaltern studies). Their work falls into the moralistic/progressive vein. Anti-Indian

“Thinking Like an Indian”

37

actions are the result of avaricious land grabbers, legal schemers, misguided policymakers, and moralizing charlatans. Donald Fixico, for example, quoted at the outset of this essay, has written an account of the exploitation of tribal natural resources in the twentieth century. In his view, the story of the fate of Native American resources is part of the story of American greed. “Greed has become the driving force in seizing land and using its natural resources without regard to the consequences,” he writes. “The tragic outcome of this ethic can be seen in the brutal exploitation that Indians have experienced.”24 Here is a moral stance not unlike that of Apess and Eastman. Americans have fallen short of their ideal of fairness. In this sense, Fixico’s monograph shares the moralist/progressive agenda of Winnemucca, Eastman, and Apess. VI How has this review helped us to understand what it has meant to “think like an Indian” about American history? First, it seems clear that Native American historical perspectives vary over time and space. Influenced by political motivation, individual life experience, and historical context, these perspectives suggest that “thinking like an Indian” requires more than projecting oneself back into the precontact tribal world. Second, and perhaps more interesting, is the fact that none of these major interpretive approaches can trace itself to precontact Native American culture. Pointing out their postcontact origins does not, of course, lessen their claim to authority as “Indian” perspectives, but it does suggest that Native American perspectives on the past are products of history as well as of cultural inheritance. There is no essential “Indian” quality that functions across real time and circumstances. It would be tempting to end this essay on that anti-essentialist note. But there is another way to view this diverse community of historians. While shifting widely in their cultural outlooks, attitudes, and assessments of American culture, each of these historians speaks as an American Indian, a historical person struggling to understand his or her surroundings. The variety within the group reveals not the transparency of Native American culture but its complexity. “Thinking like an Indian” proved not to be as singular as Donald Fixico implied it would be. “Thinking like an Indian” turned out not to be something static, but something plural, changing, and unpredictable. Striving to uncover how and what Native Americans were thinking is futile only if one sets out expecting to find the same outlook at the end of each search. If we accept the diversity of Native American historical outlooks, asserting one’s “Indianness” as an historian need not mean asserting a single point of view. Historian Richard White has observed that “there have been few peoples as culturally, politically, and socially complicated as Indians.”25

38

Frederick E. Hoxie

If this is true, as this essay has tried to make clear, focusing seriously on the experience of Native Americans cannot be a simple or predictable task. Understanding the complexity of native life, we cannot know in advance what “Indianness” will be. Nor can we predict what an Indian will think.

No t e s ╇ 1. Fixico, “Ethics and Responsibilities in Writing American Indian History,” in Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About Native Americans, ed. Devon Mihesuah (1998), 93. I am grateful to Colin Calloway, Betty Bell, and Brenda Farnell for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this essay. ╇ 2. See Ibid., 95. Washburn himself was echoing Franz Boas who believed anthropology required scholars to reconstruct the history of cultural traditions. Boas wrote, “Our material must necessarily be historical material, historical in the widest sense of the term.” Boas, “The Aims of Anthropological Research,” Science 76 (1932): 605–613; reprinted in Race, Language and Culture (1940), 244. ╇ 3. See, for example, Alvin Josephy ed., American in 1492 (1992). ╇ 4. A more scholarly version of Berger’s viewpoint is contained in a recent study of attitudes towards American history. See Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998), 162– 176. In a survey of popular attitudes towards American history, the authors found Native Americans believed their history was “the opposite” of American history. ╇ 5. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (1992), 33. ╇ 6. R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (1983), 38. ╇ 7. Arthur C. Parker, “The Code of Handsome Lake,” in Parker on the Iroquois (1968), 16–19. For the discussion of the meaning of the leg bone in the vision, see William N. Fenton, The Great Law of the Longhouse (1998), 113. ╇ 8. William Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (1992), 4. ╇ 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Ibid., 19. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. Ibid., 307. 13. Ibid., 307, 310. 14. See Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (1993), Chapter 11, esp. 138. 15. See Donald Jackson, ed., Black Hawk: An Autobiography (1833; 1955); S. M. Barrett, ed., Geronimo: His Own Story (1906; 1970). For Red Cloud and Chief Joseph as public speakers, see F. P. Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis (1976), 126, 196. 16. Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilization, 188,194. 17. McNickle, They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian (1949; 1975), 285. 18. Ibid., 93. 19. Quoted in Francis P. Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 2nd ed. (1990), 246. 20. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), 2, 4.

“Thinking Like an Indian”

39

21. Deloria, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974), 20, 82. For biographical background, see Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995), 30–41. 22. Deloria, Behind the Trail, 228; Deloria and Clifford Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (1984), 264. 23. Deloria, Behind the Trail, 85, 115. 24. Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century (1998), xix. 25. White, “Using the Past: History and Native American Studies,” in Studying Native America, ed. Russell Thornton, 237.

S heila H assell H ughes

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith: Religious Syncretism in Louise Erdrich’s and Joy Harjo’s “Mixed-Blood” Poetry

S

yncretism has generally been seen by the dominant strains of Christianity as a corruption, or “fall” from the one true faith. In contrast to the inclusive and adaptive impulses of many Native cultures, in particular, the North American Church has historically tended to resist significant transformation by traditional tribal beliefs and practices, even when such closure threatens its own viability. Achiel Peelman’s study of the presence and possibility of Christ “inculturated” among First Nations in Canada and the U.S. therefore represents an important response, by a contemporary non-Native theologian, to the inter-religious history, practice, and theology of Native peoples. Peelman insists, as will I, that a reciprocal transformation of traditions is both possible and necessary.1 The Church today is still quite resistant to transformation by forces it sees as “foreign,” of course, but it may be possible to uncover potential sources of theological revision from the “borderlands” of Christianity by smudging the line between “inside” and “outside.”2 In this essay, then, I intend to explore religious syncretism as a kind of border practice engaged in by those who situate themselves in multiple traditions and/or in the margins between them. Peelman introduces a range of terms for different kinds and degrees of religious mixing, but his definition of syncretism—as the fusion of two belief systems “to form a third, Religion and Literature, Volume 33, Number 2 (Summer 2001): pp. 59–83. Copyright © 2001 University of Notre Dame.

41

42

Sheila Hassell Hughes

new reality” (66)—comes closest to the kind of radically transformative and reciprocal practices I am interested in. Rather than thinking of syncretists as those who cross cultural lines to raid, trade with, or borrow from other religions and then retreat to their own worlds to adapt or reinvent their imports, I am concerned with those who are themselves border-dwellers, invested and implicated in multiple spheres of belief and practice. This study therefore focuses on “mixed-blood” writers—those whose familial and cultural heritage includes both Native and Euro-American lines—because they typically inhabit this kind of space. This essay also imagines poetry as a kind of “borderland” for theological reflection. While not canonized as officially sacred texts, poems, like songs and prayers, have long found a place in Christian tradition. And in recent years theologians—especially feminists—have turned increasingly to secular literature for inspiration and exemplification. Suspended between truth and lie, history and timelessness, imaginative literature opens new spaces for creative and constructive theological reflection. The “mixed-blood” poet, then, promises to be a doubly vital source for this exploration. Because Louise Erdrich and Joy Harjo exhibit a religious syncretism in their works that demonstrates not only a traditional Native approach to integration but also a specifically Christian reciprocation of that impulse, they provide particularly fruitful texts through which to consider the possibilities of mutual transformation. Through poetic imagination and linguistic play, Erdrich and Harjo create a “third space” for religious experience—and expose points of contact from which to transform both Catholic and Protestant theologies in North America. And in doing so, they unsettle radical oppositions both within Christianity and between it and tribal religions, turning these differences into what Native theologian George Tinker calls “reciprocal dualisms” (“Spirituality” 122–123). Specifically, each poet reveals the inherent conflicts in the Christian system she engages and, in the syncretic process, transforms that dichotomy into a productive and reciprocal relationship. Each also does this in ways that highlight the feminine face of God. The blurring of borders—between inside and outside, sacred and secular, human and nature, self and other—triggers a “fall” into a state of mutual need. And, for both poets, this “fall” is not ultimately a degeneration but, rather, a transformative leap of faith. Erdrich addresses Catholic asceticism and sacramentalism in her 1989 collection, Baptism of Desire. While the poems reveal a tension between natural needs and spiritual desires, between the fallen and earth-bound body and the transcendent ascent of the soul, ultimately these forces and directions are integrated rather than opposed in the poetry. Through her title image, perhaps most of all, the poet manages to hold together both essential denial and sheer celebration, ultimate need and utter fulfillment. By insisting on both the ascetic and sacramental Catholic

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

43

traditions simultaneously, Erdrich opens the door to a more traditionally tribal view of the spiritual reality and mutually regenerative power of the earth and the body—a view which also has specifically feminist implications. Harjo’s work, on the other hand, engages the Protestant emphasis on Word and Spirit. But by relying on a tribal and oral understanding of the relationship between the two terms, she, like Erdrich, brings nature and the body into play in order to expose and unsettle a potential theological conflict. Asserting that the same (feminine) spirit inspires both oral and written, tribal and biblical, religious expression, Harjo appeals to but also challenges Protestant doctrines in ways that enrich the paradoxes of Christian faith. The poems of Erdrich’s which engage Christian tradition most explicitly can be found in the first part of her second collection, Baptism of Desire. From these pages emerge modern and medieval saints and doubters; the Christian Savior and his trickster twin, the Magnificat and the Magdalene. But just as the larger volume of poetry balances the poet’s European and Objibwe heritages (the Mary Kroger and the Potchikoo series, for instance), so too these explicitly Catholic voices and visions are informed—and transformed—by a Native perspective and “traditional” religion.3 And what all of these poems emphasize in some way or another is the essential changeability and multiplicity of both physical and spiritual reality. They suggest, in turn, that flexibility and adaptability determine the viability of any religious form—regardless of origin or tradition. The four poems in the “Saint Clare” series (5–10) explore the possibilities of self-transformation through celibacy and other forms of asceticism in the Catholic tradition. But the focus here is not simply on a change from a material to a spiritual reality. Rather, spiritual power is realized in the profound connections among cohabitants of the material realm. Transcendence, then, is experienced along a horizontal trajectory as much as a vertical one, and God is immanent in our mutual desire and need. Specifically, in a number of these poems, there is the suggestion of inter-species transformation. From a Native perspective, which emphasizes ultimate and endless “relation” among all elements of life, such metamorphoses are actually quite natural. Harjo suggests that the hierarchical vision of creation most often promoted by Christianity—in which humans are the pinnacle of physical form—makes it difficult to grasp this concept, and explains that “[t]he shape is a spiral in which all beings resonate. The bear is one version of human and vice versa. The human is not above the bear, nor is Adam naming the bear.” Her summary is particularly cogent: “Transformation is really about understanding the shape and condition of another with compassion, not about overtaking” (qtd. in Ruwe 60; emphasis mine). Because all matter is dynamic and sacred—and “God . . . is a relative . . . [who] lives at the roots of molecular structure in all life . . .” (59), changes in mind can

44

Sheila Hassell Hughes

trigger changes in body. This is the tribal balance, or answer, perhaps, to the Catholic mystical belief that discipline of the body can reshape the soul. In addition to obvious transformations, such as Clare’s metamorphosis from girl, to fish, to saint in “The Call,” there are more subtle re-configurations of Christian images of sanctification in this series of poems. If, for example, we understand Clare’s vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a kind of death necessary to spiritual rebirth, then we can see in the dispersal of her bodice ornamentation and then of her very hair (in “Before”) a distinct vision of the body’s relation to the rest of creation.4 Rather than emphasizing a Christian ascetic mortification or degradation of the body that awaits a final, postponed resurrection or flight to an other-worldly heaven, the butterflies and birds suggest something closer to a Native vision, in which, after death, the disembodied spirit is “everywhere and pervades all nature” (Eastman 156). The afterlife, in this worldview, is not so much a release and separation from the created order, but a broader integration with it. It is fitting, then, that birds become Clare’s spiritual offspring in the third poem. Much as the wren weaves her nest of human hair, grass, and “silken tassels at the ends of seeds,” the poem “My Life as a Saint” itself integrates multifarious sources. The nest serves as the central symbol and site of religious integration in the poem. From her window, Clare tells us, she watches the birds at work, weaving their nest. That they are “house wrens” perhaps suggests a potential for domestication, at least imaginatively: associated with the patriarchal house and nesting place she has abandoned in favor of the convent, they stand in for the productive maternal figure Clare has elected not to become. “Then,” she observes, “the cup was made fast / to the body of the tree.” Here a domestic utensil represents the natural nest, but the metaphoric substitution also suggests a coincidence between the nest and the eucharistic cup—a reference solidified by the terms “made fast,” “body,” and “tree,” which together invoke the crucifixion. The Plains Indians’ practice of tree-burial (Eastman 152) adds further richness to the image. The tree is also, of course, the tree of life—emblem of creation and eternity in both Christian and Native symbolic systems.5 That the cup is bound to the tree “with the silver excresence of the spider” is also important. More than just a symbol for natural productivity, or even a feminist emblem of relationality, the appearance of the spider signals an increasingly pan-tribal understanding of first creation and [our] on-going role in it. Spider-woman is, as Paula Gunn Allen explains, the grandmother who spins creation into being by her own thought, and her daughters are those—poets, storytellers, bearers of culture—who continually re-weave the web of oral tradition (Sacred 13). That the eggs held in the nest are “four in number” is another Native symbol: four being the most sacred number in many tribal systems.

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

45

As interesting as these layers of imagistic syncretism are to uncover, they are but clues to the more profoundly theological implications of Erdrich’s poem. The nest woven of both natural and spiritual, Christian and Native, tissues, serves as the necessary “third space” or “borderland” from and in which to transform the Christian God and his relation to creation. As the book’s title, Baptism of Desire, subtly suggests,6 it is hunger—and even the threat of death—that the four hatchlings are born into. Observing each tiny beak spring open, “tongue erect, / screaming to be fed” before the rest of its body has even emerged from the shell, Clare now begins to understand the shape and condition of the bird. While she cannot regurgitate her own food to feed the baby birds from her mouth, as a wren would, she does the next best thing: “I did not eat. I smashed my bread to crumbs upon the sill,” she explains. Recognizing birth as an entrance into desire and need, Clare willingly takes on a new hunger for the ascetic transformation of her own body and soul, but also in service as nursemaid to the offspring of another. She identifies not only with the hunger of the infants, but also with the impossible responsibilities of maternity. And, in this identification with the mother bird, she also suggests her identification with God: “for the parents were weary as God is weary. / We have the least mercy on the one / who created us, / who introduced us to this hunger” (7). Maternity thus functions as a complex and anti-sentimental model for God in the poem because creation appears here—as in the whole volume—always to imply a need or absence. Clare’s offering up of her own bread for the infant birds is a eucharistic sacrifice by which she identifies with God, while also serving as surrogate for a mother too tired to feed her own. Christ-like, she mediates between incomprehensible creator and demanding creature, even going so far as to bury the chick she could not keep alive when “The smallest mouth starved and the mother / swept it out like rubbish with her wing.” If God is to be understood in feminine terms, then—as the mother bird of Matthew’s gospel (23:37), gathering her chicks under her wings—she is nonetheless not the idealized maternal figure of Church tradition or of some romantic feminist refigurations. God apparently is a creator who introduces her children to needs she cannot fill. So, as Clare takes responsibility for sustaining creation, she suggests that the saint’s role is to pick up where the original creator-mother leaves off, demarcating the bearing and raising of young in such a way as to undermine biological determinism (for both gender and species). This exercise of responsibility across lines of species is one that a Native view of creation as on-going, active, collaborative, and non-hierarchical in fact requires. Clare, whose celibacy is symbolized by the newly empty nest—“the small brown begging bowl, / waiting to be filled”—identifies, again with the mother/creator in her loss of young, but she willingly shapes “an emptiness within” herself that she “make[s] lovely / as the immature birds make the air

46

Sheila Hassell Hughes

by defining the tunnels and the spirals / of the new sustenance” and “fling themselves / deep into the world.” So her rejection of physical reproduction becomes another kind of production, by which she fashions a new world within herself. She remains focused on this inner space, tied to the nest, bowl, and convent, unlike the birds who are “no longer hindered by the violence of their need.” Her need is that of the creator, rather than the creature, at this point. But her asceticism—a sort of practice common to both Christianity and Native American religions7—is not meant to cut her off from the natural and physical realm in quest of the spiritual. Her celibacy is not so much a rejection of female (and) physical creativity, as a broader embrace of it in all spheres, and it is achieved only through a radical identification with other elements of nature. That “the kingdom is within” means here that Clare finds it within this world, and within her own body. Having transformed herself into mother bird, with her own internal nest, she understands the shape and condition of what it means to create and let loose from out of herself, and so comes closer to experiencing the shape and condition of God. This sexual asceticism, then, actually involves a celebration, rather than a rejection, of the female body. Indeed, as nest, Clare’s body becomes a kind of sacrament in itself. In the process of Clare’s identification and transformation, the Christian God also undergoes a degree of transformation. Readers expecting either a traditional orthodox representation of God the Father of saints, or an outright rejection of the Euro-Christian deity, find neither. Just as in the response of Native peoples upon initial contact, Erdrich’s answer to Christianity here is neither a “simple yes or no” (Peelman 61). Her representational integration of traditions effects a change in God, from triumphalism to weariness. God, here, is an exhausted mother who depends upon us to uphold our own role in and responsibility for the ongoing work of creating and sustaining all being. This theological shift is not far removed from what some contemporary Native scholars are trying to achieve in their challenges to the conquest tradition of Christianity. William Baldridge, for example, reflects on the Israelite conquest of the Canaanites in the Hebrew Bible, and relates it to the Canaanite woman’s radical challenge to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (15:21–28). He concludes that there is biblical precedence for “[t]he son of the god of Canaanite oppression [to] repent,” and asserts, therefore, that “[i]f we Canaanites live out our faith, we can change the very heart of God” (“Response” 101). Reclaiming and reinterpreting biblical narrative becomes, for such Native theologians, a means of changing the heart of the colonizer’s God—and, in turn, for transforming the Church and its relationship to those who stand at its margins. Imagining the Christian God in terms of need, dependence, and metamorphosis, Erdrich’s poem likewise speaks a demanding yes and a resisting no to ecclesial tradition.

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

47

Just as Erdrich weaves a sacramental vision into images of asceticism in “My Life as a Saint,” so, in poems which focus on the sacraments, she also explores the role of self-denial and mutual suffering. The tree of life—axis of the cosmos and emblem of creative sacrifice—appears in the ritual of the sun dance, now a pan-tribal element of Native American religious practice. And so it is with this ritual that Erdrich begins another series of poems, “The Sacraments” (18–24). In this section of Baptism of Desire, the inter-religious integration at work is both more clearly announced and less self-evident than in the Saint Clare series. A list of the seven Roman Catholic sacraments—Baptism, Communion, Confirmation, Matrimony, Penance, Holy Orders, and Extreme Unction—follows the title and precedes the seven numbered poems, which appear to correspond sequentially. With the exception of a prayer to a blue-eyed plaster statue in the sixth, however, there is no explicitly Christian symbolism or reference in any of these poems. It is only the framing elements that suggest the significance for Christianity of the first poem, which begins with “the sun dancers, in their helmets of sage” (18). The poet presents the sun dance as a sacrament corresponding to Christian baptism, but neither ritual is quite a metaphor for the other. In fact, both ultimately serve as signs of the ongoing spiritual reality of instability and transformation, and their intersection in the poem marks a third space, margin, or borderland for the perception of that reality. The sun dance may well be as important to tribal religion today—and as varied in its expressions—as baptism is to Christianity. According to Peelman, because the sun dance ritual, which first appeared among Plains Indians in the Eighteenth Century, “incarnate[s] practically all the major aspects of Amerindian spirituality,” it has been especially conducive to pan-Indian adoption. Serving liturgically as “the very centre of . . . their sacred space and time,” it incorporates a range of Native symbols, including “the circle, the medicine wheel, the tree of life, the sacred pipe, and the four directions” (212). There are variations among different Native peoples, but the basic ritual requires that those who have committed themselves to self-sacrifice on behalf of the community dance all day around the central pole (a sacred tree which has been felled and stripped for this purpose), to the point of exhaustion. In some tribes, they apparently gaze at the sun while dancing. Through song and prayer, the community supports the dancers as they carry out this “elaborate form of the vision quest” on behalf of the group (212–214). In the poem’s first stanza, then, we encounter the ceremonial dancers at this point of intensity and exhaustion, “as [they are] stopped at the sun’s apogee / [standing] in the waterless light.” The adjective here not only emphasizes the intensity and dry heat of the sun, but also checks any expectations of baptismal water imagery we might bring to the poem. What we find instead of watery sprinkling or immersion is a reference to sacrificed flesh—something

48

Sheila Hassell Hughes

we would more likely anticipate in the poem corresponding to communion. In fact, it is only in the latter poem that images of rebirth out of water appear at all, so the imagery and themes appear to be reversed. On a first reading, therefore, one might question whether the sequence of poems corresponds to the list of sacraments at all, because Erdrich deliberately plays against Christian theological expectations in each of the poems. The poet also plays against formal expectations. After the third-person introduction of the sun dancers in the first three lines, the poem appears to take a turn, as the dancers become an analogy for some less identifiable act of sacrifice on the part of the speaker. The stanza continues, “so, after loss, it came to this: / that for each year the being was destroyed, / I was to sacrifice a piece of my flesh. / The keen knife hovered / And the skin flicked in the bowl. / Then the sun, the life that consumes us, / burst into agony.” The analogical “As . . . so . . . ” structure indicates that the speaker here is not herself a sun dancer, but that her unspecified act of sacrifice is like the ceremonial one: sacred and essential. The “being” whose destruction or erosion prompts the sacrifice is obscure, but the absence of personal pronouns suggests something larger than, if not apart from, the speaker herself. Perhaps it is “being” itself. And if the universe is a living thing, and “being” is commensurate with the universe, then this “life that consumes us” is renewed by such ceremonial acts. It is only when the “skin flicked in the bowl,” after all, that “the sun . . . / burst into agony.” The sun is to be reborn, a new cycle of creation to begin, and the individual’s suffering to become a meaningful part of the larger pattern of rebirth—a kind of cosmic baptism, perhaps. The speaker’s consumption by and consummation with the sun/life corresponds to a baptismal submersion, indicating her own transformation and eventual emergence. Here is another point where Erdrich’s syncretic images offer to transform Christian theology. Just as the universe continues in cycles of creation and destruction, so the individual, Vine Deloria explains, is part of that same pattern: “The meaning of history is not that we are saved from it but that we participate in it. Thus our own demise is not a real catastrophe but a fulfillment of larger cosmic meaning” (“Christianity” 34). Could this understanding of a participatory demise become a meaning of baptism? The connection between this understanding of the universe, centered symbolically in the sun along the axis of the sacred dance, and the Christian ritual of symbolic death and rebirth, is surely the foundation for Erdrich’s poem. But, of course, Christianity has not often promoted cosmic and carnal responsibility as essential to baptismal vows, and Deloria’s suggestion that “the Christian universe is dead, except for man” (33), has probably too often been true.8 Perhaps, then, Erdrich’s poem is not simply about finding a Native parallel for the Christian sacrament (or vice versa)—to set up an informative or enlightening analogy—but also to achieve a transformative

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

49

integration by which the Christian ritual of baptism becomes something new. We might even see the poem as a radical baptism of the sacrament itself. If so, it suggests the kind of “Native American witness to Christianity” called for by Native theologians Paul Schultz and George Tinker (67). It extends the application of the oft-quoted gospel verse, “For God so loved the world” ( John 3:16), to emphasize God’s grace to all of creation9 and, with its vision of our radical inseparability from the natural realm, it might just offer one step towards Baldridge’s vision that “it is now time for [Native peoples] to save the missionaries” (“Reclaiming” 89) from their destructive insistence upon separate absolutes. While the poem’s first stanza sets up the analogy between the sacrifice of the dancers and the individual speaker, in the second stanza the relation changes into something more direct and material. Just as Clare metamorphosizes into fish or bird in the “Saint Clare” poems, so the speaker becomes a sun dancer here. “We began,” the first lines describe, “the wands and bracelets of sage, / the feathers cocked over our ears.” The bird that appears in the following lines is explicitly female, and, if lacking any suggestion of domesticity, still bears some resemblance to the inscrutable mother wren in “My Life as a Saint.” She may be the spirit alighting, as in the dove at Jesus’ baptism, but she is more wild and violent than most Christian imagery. And she is not merely a symbol or icon, but the material embodiment of the Spirit. Joining the circle, perhaps because the dancers themselves have adopted the adornment of feathers, and so understand the shape and condition of the bird, she calls to the dancers. They “cried back” in response, and then “Her wings closed over us, her dark red / claws drew us upward by the scars, / so that we hung by the flesh.” The scarification of the dancers becomes the point of physical contact, and the bird’s swooping down to catch them up in her claws suggests the act of a predator. Spirit and dancers are locked in the symbiosis of hunter and prey. In Native practice and perspective, such a relationship depends upon mutual need and respect, and the hunter identifies with the animal who has sacrificed itself on his behalf. He might wear its skin to symbolize this grateful identification, and the life of the consumed creature is understood to resonate and remain in those who partake. In the poem, nature’s sacrifice is reciprocated, with the dancers offering themselves up for the rejuvenation of the sun/spirit. They are drawn up by the bird, who is the hovering and enclosing mother/spirit, and who becomes one with the sacred pole itself, the center from which the flesh of the dancers hangs. Of course, this imagery suggests crucifixion as well, multiplying the signifiers of sacrifice. In the third and final stanza, the poet introduces another analogy, and so shifts the axis of the poem one more time. The dancers (the “we” of the second stanza) hang, “as in the moment before birth / when the spirit is quenched /

50

Sheila Hassell Hughes

in whole pain, suspended / until there is no choice, the body / slams to earth / the new life starts.” Not only does the sun dance function here as a symbol for death and rebirth, but birth (perhaps even the spiritual re-birth of the individual in baptism) also serves to help understand the dance itself. The pattern of signification is neither linear nor unidirectional, then, but cyclical and reciprocal. The individual is consumed and subsumed by the sun, transformed by her sacrifice and incorporated into a communal dance, and then joined by and caught up in the spirit-bird-mother. Birth, in the final line, is the beginning of “the new life”—a body emerging, individuating, and falling from the all-encompassing and suspending labor of the mother, whose own body is still one with her child in the pre-delivery moment of “whole pain.” Birth, then, marks the beginning of the mother’s needs as well. Indeed, Erdrich’s work suggests that any act of creation makes a dependent creator . . . and if cosmic creation is mutual, then universal interdependency is inevitable. The “whole pain” that precedes birth now divides, and the new life emerges into desire for re-union. From a Native perspective, however, the loss of the mother that occurs at birth is never entire, because every loss is always part of a larger cycle of destruction and regeneration. The division of the maternal body in birth, then, becomes a model for the reciprocal dualism of baptism. The phrase “when the spirit is quenched” suggests that this creation/ birth is a kind of baptism in multiple ways. First, the word “[q]uenched” gives us our only water image in the poem, and serves as an interesting correlative for the “waterless light” that marks the dancers’ moment of symbolic death. The reference to “spirit” might also indicate that this is a spiritual birth or re-birth. There is, as well, a biblical directive against “quench[ing] the spirit.” Paul warns the Church not to put out the spirit’s fire by treating prophesy with contempt, but instead to “test everything” (I Thessalonians 5:19–21a). When the maternal water has broken, and the new life yet to emerge, we might conclude, the fire/sun/spirit is quenched, submerged and suspended. It is a sacrificial moment, a moment of testing and, in this poem, a state of painful identification ripe for spiritual contact, vision or prophesy. But if the body does not then “slam . . . to earth,” the sun that consumes cannot itself be reborn and “burst into agony,” into life as a state of desire and mutual need. If the “Sun Dance dramatically re-creates the sacramentality of the entire universe,” as Peelman suggests (215), it does so in Erdrich’s poem by recreating the sacrament of baptism. Baptism is quenched in the sun dance, to be reborn as a vision of the radical inseparability of the material and spiritual, the individual and the cosmic, the human and the non-human. Christianity is not translated into the Native tongue, and the Native is not converted to Christian. Rather, as suggested by Peelman, the “center” of Christianity—the cross of Christ and baptism—is “inculturated” in another “world” here. And it is accomplished on that world’s own terms and according to its own sacred

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

51

time and space. This is not a re-interpretation of Western Christianity. Rather, it is a response to missionization—and even to Christian imperialism—that is “unique and original . . . transcend[ing] the expectations of the missionaries and objectives of their churches” (Peelman 82). And if it qualifies as what Peelman calls an “Amerindian integrat[ion of ] the Christian message in their own cultural universe” (67), it might just suspend and transform the meaning of that message beyond what the Church has ever imagined before. The “life [which] starts” at the poem’s conclusion is, after all, wholly “new.” As in Erdrich’s poetry, “need” is both the nature of being and hope of connection for Joy Harjo. Mutual desire—the effect as well as prompt for creativity, and the felt experience of reciprocal dualism—is what holds the cosmos together, and is that to which transformative acts of song and prayer give articulation. Erdrich’s use of the nest, tree, womb, and dance as sites of intersecting realities spatialize the work of transformation which, in Christian tradition, has more often been figured in temporal terms (e.g. sanctification over time). Harjo’s work further intensifies the spatial element—turning even music and the word into spatial realities. Hers is not a Western reconfiguration and preservation of the oral into inert text, however. Rather, it is the penetrable qualities of sound—as integrative acts of gathering across space that Harjo celebrates. Like the nest and dance, song and prayer collect and integrate the here and there, holding disparate worlds together in transforming paradox. And, like Erdrich, Harjo’s view of creation as cyclical and mutual is key to her engagement with Christianity. In part because the Christian belief and practice of Harjo’s grandparents was Protestant, her work more directly addresses the Bible and the Holy Spirit, in contrast to Erdrich’s ascetic and sacramental interests. Harjo’s celebration of the word resembles the approach of some Native theologians, especially when she suggests that the oral tradition of Native peoples—the “stories, . . . songs, rituals and ceremonies that celebrate and praise God as well as instill . . . an awe of the mystery of life”—constitute a “bible” (“Song” 419). She is certainly less clearly Christian in her approach than those who have concluded that Native oral tradition operates as a unique and supplemental “Old Testament” or “Native Covenant” that, like the Hebrew Bible, is fulfilled in Christ (McKay 52; Charleston 75). But her insistence that the sacredness of any “bible” is specific “to the peoples it was given to, to a particular shape and spirit of land and language” (419–420) echoes their concern that the Hebrew and Christian testaments be dialogized and contextualized by the history and realities of this continent. As Native Christians do, Harjo grants divine inspiration of the Bible, while insisting that her people, “The Creeks (or Muscogees) already had a spiritual path laid down in the very beginning, given by the same Creator” (419).

52

Sheila Hassell Hughes

She asserts that the same spirit breathes life into both Christian and tribal spirituality; but she also stresses the importance of continuity with one’s origins. Acknowledging her own people’s geographical displacement from the southeast to Oklahoma, she asks, “How do you rebuild in a place far from home, when your records are etched in the land and skies of another land?” The answer of some Creeks was, apparently, to adopt a new text and tradition to grant meaning to the new place: “For some,” Harjo interprets, “Christianity became a refuge, another way to understand the sacred that perhaps masked the loss. They found ways to incorporate Christianity, for ultimately, without the fundamentalism and agenda of the colonizers, the Bible allowed another way to speak of the sacred” (“Song” 421). Those who brought the Bible to the Muscogee were evidently more concerned with maintaining religious purity than were the Indians, for they drew a line of separation between those who took to the Bible and the traditionalists, where the people themselves apparently saw no absolute division (421). Harjo, who claims both “the rhythms of speaking and singing from the Bible” and “the current of the powwow drum, and turtle shells shaking” (432), situates herself on this line or border. Recognizing the productivity and possibility of the biblical word as distinct from the limitations put on speech by Christian institutions and practices, she finds power in the word because it is paradoxical and multivocal. Although the sacred text or tradition is in some senses specific to the location of its production, and requires attention to context to safeguard its power and proper use (420), it also speaks more (para-dox) than can be contained by any one site or position. And this excess is necessary for continuance because survival requires adaptation and innovation. For Harjo, then, the Bible itself offers a marginal site from which to expose the porous borders of Christianity and prompt its transformation. The reality of the unspoken and unseen are particularly important to Harjo, and for her it is in liminal spaces and ecstatic moments that these become perceptible. As a child, Harjo encountered what she calls “the unspoken Bible”: “stories and songs that were never spoken, because there was no place for them within the context of colonization in Oklahoma in the 1950s and later 1960s. Even the Bible had forbidden parts,” she concludes, “and other paradoxes of meaning” that provided points of entry or contact between worlds. “As a child of two cultures (or more precisely three and more),” she continues, “my belief system had to embody paradox or it would not be useful for navigating through this life” (“Song” 424). From youth, she also had various kinds of non-rational knowledge (such as visions and dreams), and so found herself identifying with biblical figures whose spiritual experience transcended the purely rational and material—such as Jacob wrestling the angel (425). The biblical word thus represents more than the pure reason that

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

53

the Western concept of “logos” might suggest. It is, primarily, spirit, giving breath to new and ongoing articulations of the sacred. This emphasis on paradox and spirit leaves the poet free to question “the letter of the law” from the border of religious traditions. Like Erdrich, her focus is on the material reality of the sacred. Indeed, both poets celebrate the body—and especially the female body—as a source of both need and fulfillment and, therefore, as a model of connection and, ultimately, of the sacred itself. If sensuality is a sin, she asks in her meditation on the biblical Song of Solomon, “Then why did God create us / to enjoy ourselves and each other / as representatives of God’s / body, for aren’t we the sons / and daughters of God?” The poet relies here not only on the official and written word for her challenge, but also on creation itself—which has always been recognized as a means of divine revelation by Christians, if less enthusiastically in Protestant traditions. Like Erdrich, she looks to the sensual interactions of all animate life—noting how even “the spring grass enjoy[ed] / the little winds sliding through it.” Of all life, including humans, she concludes, “We crave the comfort / of the song we make / with each other” (“Song” 426). This craving, which is and is for song, is Harjo’s point of entry to the Bible itself. And it is much like Erdrich’s “desire.” In fact, these lines from “Song of Solomon” resonate profoundly with the second poem in Erdrich’s “Sacraments” series, on communion, in which frogs pull themselves to the water’s surface to “sound one clear unceasing note of need.” The speaker herself is caught up in the frogs’ song, and sinks to her knees to bear witness to “the ravenous trill / of the body transformed at last and then consumed / in a rush of music.” She concludes by calling back to the frogs, “Sing to me, sing to me” (BD 19). For both poets, that which stirs us to sing is the song of transformation working in us, as we come into our own sensual desires. “This urge / is born within each / human,” Harjo writes, “at the transformation of becoming / woman from girl / or man from boy” (427). Desire for an other is not reduced here to a merely human or heterosexual vision of fulfillment by Harjo, though. The adolescent stirring is “similar to the corn / learning to sing as it grows / to the sky,” she asserts, and at no point is the “beloved” for whom the speaker longs identified in gendered terms. The difference that is important here is not an absolute and inalterable gender opposition, but an internalized and transformative possibility—“this thing / that was turning me inside out.” This is the reciprocal duality described by Tinker. “The architectural geography of [Native] spirituality,” in which above and below, sky and earth, are understood in mutual, interdependent, and egalitarian terms, he explains, means that the incorporation of difference serves both a political function (group cohesion) and a spiritual one (the recognition that combination and struggle are necessary for balance) (Tinker 122–123). Longing for, and identification with, “each other,” this poem therefore suggests, effects a balancing material

54

Sheila Hassell Hughes

and spiritual metamorphosis in each one: “the fire changing us / from stone, to animal to human animal / to spirit” (427). This is where Harjo comes closest to Erdrich’s practice of integrating Native and Christian rituals or sacraments. The images of fire and stone suggest the sweat lodge or vapor bath, a ceremony by which one can achieve a new spiritual state and receive sacred visions. Baptism or communion are often compared to the rite of the sweat lodge (e.g. Eastman 84), but again Harjo’s focus is more on the experience of word and song than sacrament: “The holy ghost danced through these songs,” she concludes. At this point, then, dance— the embodiment of song—becomes the dominant image of transformation. In the prose section which follows this poem in “Song of Solomon,” Harjo describes a visit to her uncle Clark’s “holiness church”—a gathering of poor sharecroppers and laborers—that serves as a site of cultural and spiritual permeability. To her astonishment, here in the midst of seeming stoicism and sensual repression, music, preaching, and eventually even dance effect a “transformation of the congregation.” These people too, it seems, are being turned inside out in a state of ecstasy (or literal ex-stasis).10 By the end of the service, all participants are “filled with the Holy Ghost,” who, the young Harjo is informed by her cousin, “sang and talked through them.” They are “dancing around the church in a conga line, singing and praising God,” she observes. “[A]mazed at this transformation,” the fourteen-year-old makes a theological leap and concludes that “the Holy Ghost must be a woman. Why else would she be invisible in a church that told wives to be obedient to their husbands as if they didn’t have souls?” (429). Like Erdrich, then, Harjo feminizes God. In the former poet’s image of the mother wren and her offspring, we saw this accomplished through the exploration of creation as the institution of mutual need—or the felt presence of an absence. Harjo’s text achieves the same feminizing effect by examining invisibility—or the sensible absence of a presence. Harjo is also, again, distinguishing between the spirit of the word and the letter of the law held by institutional “keepers of the book.” She applies a tribal, anti-hierarchical perspective on gender to a critique of Christian sexism, in a way which is quite fitting. “[I]nnovat[ing] within a circle of changing tradition,”11 she offers a fresh interpretation of the Spirit, which also reflects a long tradition of seeing the third person of the Christian Trinity as Sophia, the feminine personification of Wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures.12 Her scathing conclusion about the Spirit’s invisibility—corresponding to an erasure which the Church historically has attempted not only in regards to women, but also to all that is Native (as in the motto “kill the Indian to save his soul”)—then exposes for institutional hypocrisy what is too often passed off as theological paradox (i.e. sexism).13 True paradox, for Harjo, is more like Erdrich’s sacrament and Tinker’s reciprocal dualism. It is organic and in-process, like the

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

55

“power of the corn growing” (427). The tension of paradox, like that of metaphor, analogy, and sacrament, is the unstable border between is and is not, inside and outside, which is always ready to shift, burst, and transform. Like Erdrich’s, then, her poems expose instabilities at the heart of Christian doctrines as a resource for transformation. Perhaps because the Spirit in “Song of Solomon” is not silent, if invisible, Harjo is able to hear in her voice the song of her beloved. So she fosters the hope of metamorphosis, and sets out to urge the Holy Spirit toward a newly visible form. The young Joy therefore returns to successive services with her clarinet, and accompanies her piano-playing uncle. The author relates what transpires in terms fitting a prophetic vision: The fourth night I finally saw the Holy Ghost. By then I’d almost given up. I’d been looking for a shimmering spirit, like the ones who used to visit when I was a child, or for an angel-like presence to come floating out of the sky while the preacher was talk-singing. Instead, she appeared to me in the most unlikely place, in the face of a timid young woman who wasn’t more than twenty but looked twice her age. She wasn’t the face of the beloved I had imagined. Her four children circled here as she shook in communal passion on the linoleum floor of the church. The Holy Ghost gave this woman her tongue, turned her into an orator who sang beautiful words in a mysterious and compelling language. (430)

Like Erdrich’s wren (also mother of four) this vision involves an integration of tribal and Christian perspectives. The number indicates ceremonial time and sacred space in Native terms, but that the Spirit appears in a church, is identified as “the Holy Ghost,” and brings the pentecostal gift of tongues clearly marks the event as ecclesial. One world is not subsumed by the other, however, for the Spirit herself appears in a new, third form—one which replicates neither the “shimmering” presences of Harjo’s Indian spirituality nor the angels of Christian tradition. Instead, she takes on the body of a woman who is both Christian believer and Corn Mother: “In her I saw the power of the fields, what made the corn grow,” Harjo concludes; “I saw the loved [sic] and the beloved. It was a power similar to what I have seen since, in the ceremonies of my Muscogee people as we prayed and danced together” (431). The Spirit’s song, therefore, is paradox itself. Singing in unknown tongues—even in members of the ecclesial body—she utters more than the Church can contain or comprehend. It takes a paradoxical position between worlds, perhaps, to note the transformative integrity of this voice. The offspring

56

Sheila Hassell Hughes

of a Creek father and a mixed-blood Cherokee and French mother (who had been told to expect twins) (“Ordinary” 265), a poet and musician who loves the Black-originated forms of jazz and the blues (that most paradoxical mix of joy and lament) (267), and the descendent of Creek Baptist missionaries, Harjo seems well-situated, with an ear well-tuned, to embrace this kind of music. Her ear, like her eye, is integrative. “I walk in and out of many worlds,” she states, I used to see being born of this mixed-blood/mixed-vision a curse, and hated myself for it. It was too confusing and destructive when I saw the world through that focus. The only message I got was not belonging anywhere, not to any side. I have since decided that being familiar with more than one world, more than one vision, is a blessing, and I know that I made my own choices. I also know that it is only an illusion that any of the worlds are separate. (“Ordinary” 266)

If the inability of the “mixed-blood” and multicultural poet to sustain a singular cultural identity and location suggests a “crack” in her integrity—as traditional or Christian, as Native or Western, as tribal or urban—it is a fissure which is endlessly productive. It is like “Rabbit’s heart cracking open” in unquenched desire and doubt, to birth humanity. This is the Muscogee trickster myth Harjo dialogues with the biblical logos-myth in her prose poem “Original Memory” (IMLW 47). Like Rabbit, the poet hovers on the not-yet abyss of between times, and the song which bridges and connects the singer to multiple worlds is, as we saw in “Song of Solomon,” desire. Desire, it seems, is inextricable from doubt, and is an agent of creativity. “Love is always love,” Harjo writes, “but we’re convinced there isn’t enough there either, so we pull ourselves out of our ceremonial spiral . . . into this other world because whatever world we are entering or leaving we are still looking for love” (47). If Harjo’s response to the official word of the Church is not Christian belief, her suggestion that doubt may have been present with the Word in the beginning implies a paradoxical and potentially transformative relationship between belief and doubt at the borders and margins of religion. Like the tension between presence and absence in states of need, of desire, or of perceptible invisibility, this pair of terms is significantly relational. Faith and doubt, like sensuality and sensibility, are the felt experience of the borderlands. They are what blur the margins of identity and make connection with the Other possible. Such a transformative relationship appears in the title poem of Harjo’s collection The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. Another of her many prosepoems, it recounts and interweaves multiple narratives: the early years of

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

57

Johnny and Lila as Indian kids, bereft and abused in a Catholic boarding school; the encounter of their present-day urban incarnations—the Vietnam veteran St. Coincidence and the woman falling toward him from the sky; and the tribal myth about women who ran off with the stars. Both of the poem’s central figures have survived trauma by adopting elements from spiritual narratives to reinvent identities for themselves that embody the paradox of their worlds. St. Coincidence is the name the man takes for himself in “the city of terrible paradox.” He is “not a saint, perhaps a murderer,” we are informed. But because the latter is true only if we “count the people he shot during the stint that took his mind in Vietnam or Cambodia,” we are left to wonder whether he isn’t, rather, or also, a victim (5). St. Coincidence is an ambiguous figure, and his vision of the woman falling from the sky outside a Safeway store is likewise open to interpretation. On one level he is the stereotypical doomed urban Indian, confusedly grasping at bits of Christian and tribal memory to name the alcohol-induced hallucinations that sustain his pathetic hope. But from another perspective, he is the Saint he claims to be—bearing the nation’s mortification and, through suffering and denial, achieving otherworldly vision on our behalf. A postmodern prophet, he perceives the “safe way” of entry between heaven and the supermarket. As his name (Coincidence) and location (paradox) suggest, he is in some ways both, and if he does not quite transcend tragedy by spiritual means, he at least survives. It is his refusal to be simply either Indian victim or Catholic martyr that ensures his survival. Too disconnected from tribal life to be one of Erdrich’s Sun Dancers, he nonetheless practices a similar kind of participatory demise in his daily life, and ultimately suggests the promise of a mutual regeneration. Embracing the coincidence of dual identities, he is able to counter the “wave of falling” with “the converse wave of gathering together” (9). He is not caught up and re-birthed by any spirit-bird, but when he catches the falling woman in his arms, he too is caught and re-gathered. The falling woman has likewise undergone a series of transformations sparked by loss and desire. It is not entirely clear how the girl Lila became the woman in the sky, but even in school her “spirit knew how to climb to the stars” and Johnny had “watched her once make the ascent, after a severe beating” (6). If her self-separation is the transcendence necessary to the survival of trauma, it is only a temporary escape. A return and reincorporation is required. Despite their Catholic education, Lila and Johnny share a strongly tribal spiritual vision, which, in contrast to Western Christianity, is more spatial than temporal (Deloria “Vision” 112; Schultz and Tinker 62). They are not waiting out their suffering, invested in some future revelation, redemption, or triumph over evil. Instead, they look for points of contact and entry between

58

Sheila Hassell Hughes

co-existing worlds, as a means to strengthen and balance themselves to carry on in the work of maintaining evil within limits—to achieve personal and cosmic harmony and wholeness. In response to the reality of evil, the young Lila is not interested in debating whether God is “father of saints” or “mother of demons.” She has “seen God and could tell you God was / neither male nor female and made of absolutely everything of / beauty, of wordlessness” (7). The nuns, distressed as much by her mysticism as apparent religious syncretism, dismiss her vision as “blasphemy” (8). They cannot grasp the paradox of a God who is both utterly present in creation—even in the shape of “a flock of birds who / know exactly when to turn together in flight”—and also wholly unnamable (7). Lila not only sees God, she knows how to meet God—to enter the shape and condition of this unspeakable beauty—and fly. When we find the woman falling, then, it is not from grace; she is not the Christian “fallen woman” whom the saint will restore. Her fall, like the birth-slam to earth in Erdrich’s baptism poem, is the necessary balance to her climb, and constitutes the flight to which she has been leaning since conception. In fact, she descends to earth “in a slow spin, like the spiral of events marking an ascension of grace” (5). In the “reciprocal dualism” Tinker attributes to the architecture of a Plains Indian cosmology, earth and sky, above and below, relate in a circle of balance and reciprocity, which is reflected in exogamous kinship practices (122–123). Lila’s ascent to the stars is sparked by a myth that makes this necessary pattern of exogamy quite literal, and her fall therefore does not imply degeneration, but simply a re-crossing or incorporative return. Having run off with one of the stars who had “made their way down stairs of ice to the earth / to find mates,” and having given birth to several children by him, Lila appears fully incorporated into the realm of the sky. The story of crossing-over that was “told before she’d grown ears to hear, as she turned / from stone to fish to human in her mother’s belly,” (8) seems finally to have fixed in another evolutionary form. But, like one of the women in the myth, Lila eventually feels called back by the song or prayer of Johnny’s memory. “She dared to look back and fell,” the old story goes, “Fell through centuries, through the beauty of the night sky.” Like Lot’s wife, the mythical woman and Lila disobey their husband’s warnings, look back, and vanish. Unlike the biblical figure, their falls are leaps into another life, and answers to someone else’s remembering of them. Finding herself at the threshold she’s been warned is “too sacred for women,” Lila clutches her twins, and with her other child clinging to her, looks “into the forbidden place” and “leap[s].” Like the unnamed woman who “took up where she had left off ” (8), Lila lands in the arms of St. Coincidence. That her star children are safely in tow suggests that the return is more than a simple reversal, however. The presence of her mixed-realm children signals the importation of innovation. Mythical

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

59

women who run off for inter-species sexual escapades, after all, often return with items or offspring that prove essential to the survival of the people. The woman’s return to earth may be seen as yet another transformation, therefore. “[T]he urge to fly,” for Lila, had been “as strong as the need to push at the precipice of any birth,” so when St. Coincidence’s memory/song/prayer becomes something she cannot ignore, her plunge off the precipice of heaven is both a spiritual flight and a birthing. When she lands back on earth, she has come round in a spiral, not merely circled on the same plane. As the saint literally turn’s from his panhandling, he becomes something new, as well, catching the woman whom he has called back into her new self. “Everyone turns together,” Lila’s childhood vision of God suggested, “though we may not see each / other stacked in invisible dimensions” (7). Memory can effect a literal re-membering of relations, it seems, as Johnny and Lila are gathered together in the poem’s final lines. But those relations are always also being refigured by the incorporation of difference. The opening poem of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, “Reconciliation: A Prayer” introduces the image of gathering as a sacred act of mutual integration that depends upon both memory and hope. It begins: We gather at the shore of all knowledge as peoples who were put here by a god who wanted relatives. This god was lonely for touch, and imagined herself as a woman, with children to suckle, to sing with—to continue the web of the terrifyingly beautiful cosmos of her womb. This god became a father who wished for others to walk beside him in the belly of creation. (no pag.)

Such gathering happens at the point where knowledge turns to imagination, and imagination then effects transformation. “We” push to the limits of our known world, and recognize god as a relative. This doesn’t necessarily involve anthropomorphism, of course, since from a Native perspective all that is animate is related, and all creation is animate. This recognition and identification happens at the border and intersection of worlds. As in Lila’s vision, God is neither male nor female here, and is not imagined as such per se. “Man” is not made in “God’s image” and God is not projected in man’s. Rather, it is this god’s own desire and imagination—flexible and fluid enough to enable transformations as mother, father, sister, brother, and lover—that prompt a creative process of individuation and identification. There is not so much a “Fall” in this creation story, either, as a leap into, and into the space of, an other. God still walks in the belly of creation. If there is nevertheless a profound sense of disintegration and loss in this “prayer,” it is

60

Sheila Hassell Hughes

to be countered not by a rejection of this world—a desire to return to some other-worldly or pre-modern “garden”—but rather by a stubborn and mutual holding together of it. “Oh sun, moon, stars,” the speaker calls, “our other relatives peering at us from the in- /side of god’s house walk with us as we climb into the next century / naked but for the stories we have of each other. Keep us from giving / up in this land of nightmares which is also the land of miracles.” To repudiate the nightmare and give up on and in history means disengagement from the other side of the paradox, which is miracle. Story and song (“which we’ve been promised has no beginning or / end”) are not elegiac substitutes for connection, but the very performance which “gather[s] up” the “strands broken from the web of life” (no pag.), reweaving survivors together with their lost relatives, with each other, in the ever-changing fabric of the cosmos. In both of these poems, prayer is the vocal hinge between worlds. The re-calling of one’s relations (lost loves, ancestors, creator, etc.) in story or song bridges the spiral of time to bring those “stacked” in different spatial dimensions into coincidence. Like the jazz duet of “Original Memory” or the clarinet invocation of the Spirit in “Song of Solomon,” prayer functions as a paradoxical act for Harjo, holding together the disparate realities of pain and love, earth and sky, absence and presence. A Native vision of “all my relations,” which emphasizes the “where” of spiritual fulfillment and wholeness (i.e. in our midst) rather than a “when” (i.e. later), also unsettles the Western dualisms of earth/heaven, now/then, fall/grace and could bring a radically integrative understanding to Christian prayer—as a walking and singing with the original, transforming, and transformative Word. By refusing to separate the power of the Christian Word from the presence of a pan-religious Spirit and from paradox—Harjo indicates new possibilities of reciprocity both within Protestantism and between religious traditions. Likewise, Erdrich, in her exploration of the tension between ascetic and sacramental traditions suggests that the Native values of balance and mutuality can enliven Catholicism. In both poets’ revisions of Christian tradition, the inseparability of material and spiritual realities, and the creative power of the female body—which is both needy and nourishing—are essential elements. Each poet also offers a vision and model of inter-religious integration which speaks a word of hope as well as criticism, a “yes” and also a “no,” to the Church. The transformations of Christian sacrament, Word, and Spirit enacted in their works pose a radical challenge to paternalistic, linear, hierarchical, and triumphalistic models of faith. Their insistence on holding together faith and doubt, birth and death, creation and desire, heaven and earth, through analogy, paradox, and other transformative rituals of language, bears witness that, if the religious language of the Church seems irrelevant for

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

61

both Native and Euro-Americans, the potential for transformation remains. Continuing the work of co-creation, these poet-makers sustain the possibility of Christian meaning in postmodern America by exposing the permeable boundaries of the faith. From the intersection of worlds and the margins of the Church, their voices urge those within to let go of the oppositional structures which bind us to ideals of purity and dominion, and to let ourselves fall into the radical and paradoxical desire for transformation by the immanent other—the ones whose erasure is marked by our presence on this continent. Such a fall is also a leap of faith—a willful belief that such transformation is essential to our mutual continuance and co-incidence in this shared world.

No t e s 1. Recent collections by editors James Treat and Jace Weaver attest to the variety of experiences and range of approaches of Native American clergy, laity, and theologians themselves—and of their Native “post-Christian” dialogue partners. 2. Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizing of geographic, cultural, linguistic, psychic, and spiritual “borderlands” and of a hybrid, “mestiza” identity inform my approach. 3. “Traditional” religion designates tribal beliefs and practices that have precontact roots. 4. The term “creation” is especially useful to this study because of its ambiguity. It is used in Native as well as Christian traditions and implies both the created order and the act of creating. It signals the spiritual significance of the natural realm, but may well indicate quite different views of spiritual presence and of relations among creator, creatures, and other elements. 5. Serving as an axis of cosmic forces in both traditions, the tree of life offers a particularly useful image with which to explore inter-religious integration. Peelman’s comparison of two paintings which explore the tree of life symbol—“Christ on the Tree of Life,” painted by Pacino De Bonaguido in early fourteenth-century Italy, and the 1983 work of Anishnabe artist Blake Debassige—is fascinating and relevant. Of Anishnabe heritage on her mother’s side, Erdrich’s poem presents a 13th-century Italian saint whose vision of the tree of life is closer to Debassige’s than to the medieval European painter’s. In Debassige’s work, the Christic body and the natural realm are integrated, such that the body itself (both male and female, light and dark) is not “on” the tree, is itself the trunk and limbs of the tree (Peelman 194 / 211). 6. As Erdrich’s book jacket explains, the literal meaning of “baptism of desire” is more narrow. “Baptism by blood, water, or desire is necessary for salvation in Roman Catholic tradition, and baptism of desire is the term used for the leap of trust by which a sincere believer can experience spiritual regeneration.” 7. Susan Stanford Friedman’s treatment of syncretism in Erdrich’s 1988 novel Tracks highlights ascetic practices in both Catholic and Ojibwe traditions and offers a helpful analysis of the interplay between political and religious forces in the author’s work. 8. Erdrich appears less inclined than Deloria to conclude that “Christianity is the chief evil ever to have been loosed on the planet” whereas “tribal religions have a great deal of insight and can be very helpful to people today” (“Christianity” 31). Indeed, Deloria’s characterization (or caricature) of Christianity reenacts the

62

Sheila Hassell Hughes

very polarization he blames on the imperialistic impulse of that religion. Erdrich’s work is especially interesting precisely because—like some other “mixed blood” writers—she neither shies away from radical critique of imperialist tendencies nor ever resorts to an either/or proposition. ╇ 9. A number of Native interpreters have stressed the literal implications of “world” in the popular scriptural text “For God so loved the world . . . ” John 3:16), in order explicitly to extend God’s love and sacrifice to the non-human. See Maxey, McKay, and Schultz and Tinker, for examples. 10. I use the term “ex-stasis” to emphasis the way in which ecstatic experience involves a kind of stepping or standing outside of oneself. As such, it is tied to embodiment and social location (where one stands) and can enable a radical imaginative identification with others/otherness. 11. This is how Gail Tremblay describes the approach of Native American artisans to their craft traditions (83). 12. This tradition has most recently been revived by feminist theologians such as Elizabeth Johnson and Elisabeth Shüssler Fiorenza. 13. “The world is rife with paradox,” Harjo states, “yet paradox was not allowed in the church, or rather specifically allowed when it came to concepts such as the Trinity” (“Song” 424).

Wor k s Ci t e d Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop. Boston: Beacon, 1986. Baldridge, William. “Reclaiming Our Histories.” Treat, Native and Christian 83–92. ——— . Response to Robert Allen Warrior. Treat, Native and Christian 100–101. Charleston, Steve. “The Old Testament of Native America.” Treat, Native and Christian 68–80. Deloria, Vine, Jr. “Christianity and Indigenous Religion: Friends, or Enemies? A Native American Perspective.” Creation and Culture: The Challenge of Indigenous Spirituality and Culture to Western Creation Thought. New York: Lutheran World Ministries, 1987. 31–43. ——— . “Vision and Community: A Native American Voice.” Treat, Native and Christian 105–114. Donovan, Kathleen M. Feminist Readings of Native American Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Eastman, Charles Alexander (Oyesa). The Soul of the Indian (1911). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Erdrich, Louise. Baptism of Desire. New York: Harper, 1989. ——— . Tracks. New York: Harper, 1989. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet. New York: Continuum, 1995. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Identity Politics, Syncretism, Catholicism and Anishinabe Religion in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Religion and Literature 26.1 (Spring 1994): 107–133. Harjo, Joy. In Mad Love and War. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith

63

——— . “Ordinary Spirit.” I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Ed., Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. 263–270. ——— . “Song of Solomon.” Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives. Ed. David Rosenberg. New York: Anchor, 1996. 417–433. ——— . The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. New York: Norton, 1994. Johnson, Elizabeth. She Who Is. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Maxey, Rosemary McCombs. “Who Can Sit at the Lord’s Table: The Experience of Indigenous Peoples.” Treat, Native and Christian 38–58. McKay, Stan. “An Aboriginal Christian Perspective on the Integrity of Creation.” Treat, Native and Christian 51–55. Peelman, Achiel. Christ is a Native American. Ottawa: Novalis-Saint Paul University, 1995. Ruwe, Donelle R. “Introduction.” Dancing at the Altar: American Indian Literature and Spirituality. Ed. Ruwe. Special Issue of Literature and Religion 26.1 (Spring 1994): 1–8. Schultz, Paul, and George Tinker. “Rivers of Life: Native Spirituality and Native Churches.” Treat, Native and Christian 56–67. Tinker, George. “Spirituality, Native American Personhood, Sovereignty and Solidarity.” Treat, Native and Christian 115–131. Treat, James, ed. Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge, 1996. Tremblay, Gail. “Cultural Survival and Innovation: Native American Aesthetics.” Revivals! Diverse Traditions 1920–1945. Ed. Janet Kardon. New York: Abrams, 1994. 77–83. Weaver, Jace, ed. Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998.

Ack now l e d gme n t I am grateful to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition Forum at the University of Dayton, whose support, in the form of a summer research grant and in critical feedback from the members, helped bring these ideas to fruition.

J ason W . S tevens

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology and the Ethnic Subjectivity of N. Scott Momaday

N

. Scott Momaday rejects the label “Indian writer”: “I don’t know what that means. I am an Indian, and I am a writer, but I just don’t want to say ‘Indian writer’ or talk about Indian literature. . . . I don’t identify with it at all.”1 Momaday further asserts that he never has and never will allow himself to become a spokesman for “the Indian,” preferring instead to be seen as a mainstream writer with a distinguishing ethnic heritage.2 Since his debut in the late 1960s, Momaday has been received by most of his critics as an ethnic storyteller who, in deftly combining tribal mythologies and Euro-American lore, demonstrates the versatility of an imagination that can role-play the West’s master discourses while maintaining the integrity of a Native American heritage.3 What these commentators do not consider is the extent to which Momaday’s representation of his Native American identity draws from powerful frontier archetypes that have framed the way white Americans conceive ethnicity. Werner Sollors argues that the concept of ethnicity in the United States is a semiotic intent to mark boundaries between what are actually shifting components of external (voluntary) and inherited identification.4 Americans honor ethnicity when it is achieved, or chosen, rather than bequeathed; in the national imagination, this choice generally involves dissent from one group representing outmoded, inherited convention and integration into another American Literature, Volume 73, Number 3 (September 2001): pp. 599–631. Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press.

65

66

Jason W. Stevens

representing a new consensual order. Under the ideology of consensus, an American ethnic subject may decide what to appropriate from an ancestral heritage. For Native Americans, however, colonial deracination has left sizable gaps in a cultural history marked by the intercession of external powers intent on destroying tribal traditions. The insistently hermeneutical materials of culture are thus made more complex by a genealogical burden. Many Native Americans, moreover, believe that the articulation of their cultural identities involves reimagining as much as it does rediscovery. Despite the popular belief in a changeless Indian consciousness, Native Americans have had to “reinvent the viable conditions of being Indian,” which involves acquiring knowledge of their descent and imaginatively filling the gaps in this knowledge.5 Questions of how to integrate traditional ideas and beliefs with the modern mainstream—without producing a monolithic, abstract notion of tradition that confines Native Americans to terms of descent—have been at the fore of discussions. In this regard, Momaday’s representation of what it means to recover Indian roots reflects a problem of identity many Native Americans face. Momaday’s Kiowa identity, he claims, is considerably self-fashioned, involving the negotiation of indigenous and “external” elements, which Sollors describes as American ethnicity’s basic rhetorical structure. Drawing from many sources, Momaday has reinvented the Kiowa out of his readings in ethnographic history, his memories of his grandmother’s and his father’s stories, his contact with Kiowa living on reservations, and, not least significant, the myths of the American frontier.6 While the Native side of Momaday’s cultural dialogue has been discussed at length by others, only cursory attention has been granted to relevant American Western archetypes that have influenced Momaday’s personal mythmaking. While these mainstream sources may be read as “external,” in the sense that they are not indigenous to American Indian cultures, they must not be treated as secondary to Momaday’s imaginary. To argue, as Louis Owens does, that frontier figures like Billy the Kid in The Ancient Child are appropriated strictly for parody is to presume that the dimensions of Native and non-Native and of Indian and American are more clearly separated in Momaday’s voice than his work manifests (OD, 118–122). In fact, Momaday’s recovery of his Kiowa Indian ancestry has been both facilitated and frustrated by American frontier myths that have disturbed him since his youth; the resulting dialectic in his work registers his contention with the ways the U.S. mainstream has scored Indian ethnicity. In frontier mythology, two figures stand out: the White adventurer and the Indian savage. Both are central to Momaday’s construction of his past. “The savage,” a colonial invention to signify the opposite of U.S. civilization, has been used to describe Indians as immutably descent-based identities and to equate them with the category Nature;7 the term’s symbolic

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

67

power, moreover, has enabled the alignment of Indians with ethnic purity.8 Momaday angrily confronts the savage stereotype in his early essay “The Morality of Indian Hating” (1963) and in his 1997 postscript to it: “[I]t is imperative that the Indian define himself. . . . that he refuses to let others define him.”9 Resisting the savage stereotype, Momaday has struggled throughout his career to define a tenable ethnic persona. His notion of his own ethnicity has wavered between his understanding of an authentic body of traditional knowledge on one hand and his development of a stylized, modern posture on another. Although he grew up among Navajo and Jemez influences, Momaday has tended to portray his life story as a drama of self-transformation in which he becomes Kiowa. Since the publication of The Journey of Tai-Me (1967) and House Made of Dawn (1968) in his early thirties, he has identified himself as a Kiowa after his father’s lineage. He did not, however, grow up within the Kiowa tribal traditions on which his works draw, and he admits knowing very little of the Kiowa language. Reflecting on this declension, he claims to have appropriated his Kiowa ethnicity with an attitude of adventure: he is attracted to his Kiowa side because it seems “exotic” and presents “a greater challenge to understand” (C, 4). In his autobiography, The Names (1976), Momaday cites his mother as an influence on his decision to make himself over as a Kiowa Indian. As a teenager, his mother began “to see herself as an Indian,” he says. “That dim native heritage became a fascination and a cause for her. . . . She imagined who she was. This act of the imagination was, I believe, among the most important events of my mother’s early life, as later the same essential act was to be among the most important of my own.”10 In an interview in 1989, Momaday suggests that his Kiowa identity is an imaginative recreation from pieces of Kiowa history and thought: “I would not like to know everything about my heritage. I want to be absolutely free to imagine parts of it. The facts are not important. The possibilities are everything” (AV, 4). Yet Momaday makes equally strong claims for an indigenous Kiowa identity: “I think there was a time while growing up when I might have lost my sense of Kiowa heritage, but that’s no longer so. . . . It’s so deeply entrenched in me. . . . I’m Kiowa” (AV, 4). Central to Momaday’s self-narrative is the saving remembrance of his father’s and grandmother’s oral stories; from these, he says, he takes his voice, which “bears close relationship to Indian oral tradition. That is my deepest voice. It proceeds out of an ancient voice. It is anchored in that ancient tradition” (AV, frontis page). Describing his story in this instance as one of recovered ancestry rather than self-transformation, Momaday claims that his Kiowa ethnicity is both that which defines him and that which he defines. Because Momaday cannot escape describing himself as an ethnic person, the issue raised by this and alternative versions of the

68

Jason W. Stevens

formation of his identity is how much choice he has in specifying what Kiowa is and what his relationship is to that construct. Momaday has sought to fuse both versions of his story—the recovery of ancestry and the process of self-invention—through appropriating the heroic adventurers of American frontier myth. As critics like Annette Kolodny, Richard Slotkin, and Paul Seydor have shown, frontier myth describes a return to origins in the wilderness as a means to a realization of the self.11 I argue that although Momaday valorizes a storyteller persona who, as an indigenous Kiowa, represents him, he depicts the Kiowa’s historical experience and imaginative perception so that the storyteller bears resemblance to the popular conception of the American frontier hero as hunter and outlaw. Momaday thus tries to perform “Kiowa-ness” as an authentic version of a heroic identity that antedated the emergence of the U.S. frontiersman. Yet he does not overcome the contradiction within popular myths between the hunter-outlaw’s nostalgia for union with the wilderness and his individuating act of self-creation, for this paradox corresponds to Momaday’s ambivalence toward the Kiowa heritage he imagines. Momaday’s interest in the frontier began in childhood with westerns, such as My Darling Clementine (1946) and Billy the Kid serials, and pulp novels, such as Walter Noble Burns’s The Saga of Billy the Kid (1927). He grew up, he recalls, imagining himself as the cowboy shooting the Indian or as Billy the Kid’s avenger shooting Pat Garrett (N, 75, 111). As an adult, Momaday regards frontier myth as a vital fund of ideas for Americans: “[T]he literature of the West still has vitality, because the frontier—in a sense—is still being opened. . . . [I]t deals with a recent and ongoing experience in the American imagination.”12 Momaday is nonetheless aware that his affirmation of the frontier as a mythic space in the American mind is shadowed by fictions of the savage that attend it. In an impromptu lecture at the University of Arizona in 1992, Momaday defended a controversial passage in The Ancient Child in which Grey, a teenage Indian girl, is raped by a brutish cowboy. The rape is symbolic of the American experience of the frontier, he explained, because the literature of the frontier facilitated the destruction of Indians by turning them into an emblem, twinned with savage wilderness, to serve the desire for adventure in “civilized” readers.13 Yet in a characteristic motion, he mystified this “civilized” longing for adventure: “The Boston bank clerk who could go and read a Ned Buntline novel and just be transported into a wilderness that satisfied all his cravings . . . and then even more wonderful was the fact that, by God, it was there. People could go out on the Oregon trail and find Indians . . . that’s the terrible, exciting feature of America.”14 Key adventurer types that have emerged from narratives of the American wilderness are Faustian figures and pariahs rather than integrated members of a community. The hunter-hero, whose most enduring image is perhaps

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

69

James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, and the outlaw, his later counterpart exemplified in legendary figures like Billy the Kid, are both subject to the same fate—the death of their social identity after renouncing their membership in a “civilized” community. They divide, however, along important developmental lines. The hunter-hero seeks a spiritual marriage with the wild through the slaying of a beast or an Indian enemy, both of which are figures in an iconography of the wilderness legacy that the hunter has internalized.15 Union with the wilderness through violence promises self-regeneration, if not redemption, for his rejection of community. The outlaw figure, contrarily, may flee for refuge to the wilderness, but he does not seek a pact with it.16 For the outlaw, who is either unthinking or morbidly introspective—cut off from any sense of identity other than his motive for revenge or his sense of estrangement—the wilderness has no aesthetic or moral appeal. Whereas Leatherstocking chooses his exile, the outlaw is typically a victim of destiny, carried out by civilized law. Both figures are wanderers doomed by their inner savagery. In popular dramatizations, such as the film western, these figures have become a potent image of the American individualist who either knows and mirrors the savage or refuses to relinquish his own savage side to overbearing laws. The return to wilderness supposedly brings forth the quintessential American qualities of resourcefulness and the will to self-transformation. According to the logic of the frontier narrative, however, the discovery of these qualities is possible only for the non-native. The return-to-wilderness motif presumes a hero reborn in the wild, who forswears his previous origin. Since the Indian already belongs to the wilderness as a “savage,” he can find in it only the natural self he already is. The non-native, however, can partake of “the savage” to become another self. To insert himself, along with his Kiowa influences, into the frontier myth, Momaday attempts to regenerate the frontier hero’s violent individuation as a principle of transformation, which he attempts to locate in his personal story. For this purpose, he portrays Kiowa culture as embodying selftransformation: “Each time a Kiowa ponders his Kiowa-ness, he invents that whole history—and it is his invention, it is whatever he makes of it in his own mind” (C, 127). Momaday, moreover, patterns the Kiowa partly on the hunter and outlaw types, and he applies some of the same terms, such as centaur and nomad, to Billy the Kid in explicit comparison to his Kiowa ancestors (MMW, 35, 118).17 The Kiowa become an ethnic persona mediating Momaday’s selfinvention without threatening the sacrifice of his “Indian” authenticity. When I speak of authenticity here, I intend a sense of certification as much as a fiction of original, sacrosanct character.18 Momaday does not want to simply name himself Kiowa; he also wants to have been named for the Kiowa. Yet as I will suggest, while he receives his name from his ancestors (literally, his

70

Jason W. Stevens

Kiowa name; figuratively, his identity), he has understood that name to intend self-metamorphic power. More than any other Native American writer of his generation, Momaday has integrated frontier myths into his self-narrative and the narrative of a tribal people. While other Native American authors also face representational problems as ethnic figures, Momaday’s literary response is distinctive, and his struggle to come to terms artistically with the contradictions inherent in this effort at integrating heroic frontier stories with Kiowa myth and history is itself written into his re-imagining of these materials. Momaday’s literary construction of his Kiowa identity hence becomes confessional as much as performative. With his last novel, The Ancient Child (1989), his attempt to graft these myths onto native elements results in irony, as he begins to magnify both the nostalgia for lost origins and the incertitude of identity, which make up the dark side of the popular return-to-wilderness motif. In The Ancient Child, the odyssey of Momaday’s autobiographical character Locke Stetman (or Set), a contemporary, assimilated Kiowa Indian, leads back to the wilderness of his ancestors. Set’s journey is placed in parallel contrast to the early demise of the Wild West’s outlaw Billy the Kid. Momaday uses the legend of Billy the Kid to cast into relief the history of the Kiowa’s origin in the wilderness and their declension from it; in his personal retracing of that migration, he hopes to reverse American spiritual renunciation of the wilderness and its consequent loss of heroic, transformative power. The return-towilderness motif, as portrayed through Set’s example, thus becomes a mediation for Momaday’s quest for identity, intended to contrast with Billy’s fate. Set, however, collapses into inarticulacy at the close of the novel, suggesting that Momaday’s Kiowa ethnicity, as imagined through frontier symbols, does not specify his identity. Return to the Wilderness In The Ancient Child, the bear is “the mythic embodiment of the wilderness” (AC, prologue). Haunted by visions of this creature, Set is compelled to return to Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, known to the Kiowa as Tsoai (the rock-tree), the site of the Kiowa’s Seven Sisters myth, which, in Momaday’s version, tells of a boy transforming into a bear: Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified; they ran, and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

71

the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were beyond its reach. It reared against the trunk and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.19

Set will learn that his name translates as bear, and that he too is destined to transform into this creature. Set’s drama in The Ancient Child is the most recent version of a theme that has preoccupied Momaday since his graduate career at Stanford. He has come to see himself associated, almost symbiotically, with a bear who summons him back to the wilderness known by his Kiowa ancestors. Momaday expressed his identification with the bear-boy, whom Set reincarnates, in more than one interview during the composition of The Ancient Child in the 1980s. “[M]y work in progress,” he observes, “is about the boy who turns into a bear, and in a sense I am writing about myself. . . . I am imagining a story that proceeds out of my experience of the bear power” (AV, 13).20 In another interview, he remarks: “I have being in that story somehow, and I am curious to know as much about it as I can” (AV, 17). In returning to the bear myth, Momaday believes he is coming into contact with his “primordial memory” of Kiowa history in a way that unites him with the Kiowa experience (AV, 21). His bear-power, he believes, first emerged when he was twenty-five years old, in the year he was selected by Yvor Winters for Stanford’s Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship to hone his poetry (AV, 15). Besides enhancing his creativity, recognition of the bear helped him to understand not only many events in his past but also the meaning inscribed in his name and his destiny as the reincarnation of the Kiowa bear-boy (AV, 16). In The Names, Momaday fantasizes that his great-grandfather Pohd-lok assigned his name Tsoai-talee (rock-tree boy), the appellation of the bear-boy in the Kiowa myth of Tsoai (N, 55–57). Momaday’s bear alter-ego appears to be a conduit to the Kiowa past and to creative power. What is curious is that he often overlays the bear’s connection to tribal origins and creativity with metaphors likening the creature to autochthonous nature. Momaday has described the bear as “the primitive, that part of man which is subhuman and which most people cannot comprehend or recover” (AV, 13). When a man is transformed into the bear, he reinstates the primal link with nature: “You feel a greater kinship with the animal world and with the wilderness” (AV, 91).21 Contrary to Momaday’s formulation, no synecdochical relationship between the bear and “wilderness” exists in Kiowa culture or in traditional Native American thought more generally.22 But this equation of bear and wilderness has a precedent in the image of beasts in American hunting narratives, including Faulkner’s “The Bear,” a source for one of Momaday’s earliest

72

Jason W. Stevens

poems at Stanford, also entitled “The Bear” (1962).23 Faulkner’s depiction of Isaac McCaslin’s search through the woods for the bear Old Ben influenced Momaday’s account of Francisco’s bear hunt in House Made of Dawn (C, 75).24 As an ironic recasting of the hunt-marriage motif passed down through Leatherstocking and Daniel Boone to Isaac McCaslin, Faulkner’s “The Bear” suggests, through the boy’s witnessing, that the god-like animal’s slaying may be construed as deicide as much as sacrament. In this ambiguity, Faulkner cuts to the myth’s paradox: violence must intercede between hunter and wild spirit (be it savage Indian or savage bear) so that they can be espoused through further violence. In his poem “The Bear,” Momaday assumes the speaking persona of an Isaac McCaslin, who reveres the bear but does not know whether he can “marry” it. Momaday’s innovation is to transform the hunter’s violence, with its attendant pathos, into the activity of the speaker’s imagination as he contemplates a wilderness setting. Imagination here is the equivalent of human encroachment on nature. The poem turns upon the tension between the speaker’s desire to savor the fleeting memory of the wilderness, as concentrated in the bear, and the insinuation that the very entry of his imagination destroys the primal scene he would describe: What ruse of vision escarping the wall of leaves rending incision into countless surfaces, would cull and color his somnolence, whose old age has outworn valor, all but the fact of courage? (PS, 3)

Suggesting a hunting metaphor, the “ruse of vision” is a trap set against the bear’s courage, for it destroys “the wall of leaves” and the bear, who is one of its “countless surfaces.” The ambiguous position of the participal “rending” makes uncertain the relationship of the “ruse of vision” to the speaker’s incisive imagination, which may be complicit in disrupting the integrity of wilderness. In the poem’s last line, the motion of the bear is likened to the gliding of buzzards, who “imperceptibly control their flight.” The natural unknown that guides the bear and the buzzards may or may not be akin to the speaker’s imagination. The speaker may be alienated from the bear’s realm of experience, even though he wishes to make it part of his own consciousness.

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

73

With House Made of Dawn (1968) and The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Momaday begins to build his own narratives of wilderness, one based on personal experience and the other on Kiowa history. In both novels, he retains the idea from his poem that the wilderness represents a “bear-like” mode of being in the unknown as much as it does an originary space. In the poem, the bear can be courageous in the face of things imperceptible because he does not himself appear to have consciousness. The speaker, by contrast, tentatively approaches the unknown, for he is afraid that his imagination might “cull and color” its essence. In Momaday’s wilderness narratives, it is precisely the imaginative power to transform that his Kiowa ancestors acquire and that Momaday, a latter-day Kiowa, seeks. In contrast to the poem, the narratives attempt to affirm the imagination’s source in the wilderness and to rename it “bear-power,” thus fusing ancestral imagination and ancestral origin in the same topos. At the same time, he does not entirely relinquish the poem’s misgiving over the possibility of purely identifying with the bear, who becomes an amalgam of primeval nature and cultural inventiveness. In tales of their beginnings, the Kiowa tell of their people’s advent through a hollow log from an underworld of darkness and confusion, far from the ordered world of Nature above ground.25 In both The Way to Rainy Mountain and House Made of Dawn, Momaday grafts the underworld onto the geographical space of the Yellowstone Mountains, “the wilderness” in his imagining of the Kiowa mind. In his recollections of his Kiowa ancestry in House Made of Dawn, later reproduced in the prologue to The Way to Rainy Mountain, Tosomah explicitly defines Yellowstone as “the wilderness”: [O]ne might have the sense of confinement there. The skyline in all directions is close at hand, the high wall of the woods and deep cleavages of shade. There is perfect freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness. 26

The passage describes a regressive space where the Kiowa are blind and disempowered; the “perfect freedom” the wilderness offers belongs to the likes of the bear, whose primary sense is scent rather than vision. Of the apotheosis of the seven sisters into stars over Devil’s Tower, the marker of their transition from mountains to plains, Momaday says: “[The Kiowa] found a way out of the wilderness.”27 The star-children become the forerunners of the centaur-like Kiowa who, on horseback, would also be free of the ground and whose vision, out of the woods, would be far ranging. Momaday describes the Kiowa’s departure from the high country in western Montana and their entry onto the southern plains in terms of the coordinates of their origin

74

Jason W. Stevens

myth: “From one point of view, their migration [through the hollow log] was the fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world.” They henceforth acquired “a sense of destiny” and “transformed” into a race of horsemen.28 Between The Way to Rainy Mountain and House Made of Dawn, Momaday appears to offer a progressive narrative of the Kiowa migration as a movement from a wild origin where freedom and power belong only to animals toward a sunlit space of expanded vision and native cultural destiny. This does not, however, eliminate the recurring moments in his fiction when characters literally or symbolically undertake quests back into the wild. In Momaday’s version of the Seven Sisters myth, the progression toward the Plains and cultural definition is matched by a perilous pull back to wilderness. The boy’s possession by the bear, symbolically a regression to the blinding wilderness wherein the bear had power over the Kiowa, effects the transformation of the other children. The impetus the wilderness provides to migration and transformation lends it status as a proving ground to which later generations must return. Momaday’s work before Set’s return to the bear’s land in The Ancient Child features treks reversing the trajectory of the Kiowa emergence myth, as the characters travel backwards through apertures evoking the hollow log to spaces evocative of the wild. In The Names, young Momaday, while playing on a mesa, tries to climb down a “rocky chute,” “a deep, funnel-shaped formation” running nearly vertical to a ledge overlooking a valley. Halfway down he becomes trapped and passes out of his mind. When he awakens, he is sitting on the ledge, “very cold in the shadows”: “That was a strange thing in my life, and I think of it as the end of an age. I should never again see the world as I saw it on the other side of that moment” (N, 161). In House Made of Dawn, Francisco remembers a similar moment marking his maturation, the climax of his first hunt for a bear. He ascends into the mountains and, having discovered the trail of the bear, then descends through “a deep open funnel in the rock,” a parallel to the hollow log.29 As in the passage from The Names, Francisco climbs down rather than up the log. The slaying of the bear takes place in the symbolic space of the wilderness, into whose interior the bear’s trail has led Francisco ever deeper. Momaday, in fact, employs descriptive phrasing to evoke the hunter’s landscape similar to that used in Tosomah’s recollection of Yellowstone, and the narrative strongly resembles Issac’s lone search for Old Ben that climaxes part 1 of Faulkner’s “The Bear.”30 Once the animal is killed, Francisco eats the bear’s liver in order to acquire the creature’s power; he then ceases to be a child and becomes recognized by his people as a man. The Indian protagonists in both instances undergo initiations requiring them to undertake sojourns in the wilderness, whether symbolic or literal. They achieve maturation through either a change in consciousness or the acquisition of advanced power. In Momaday’s telling, these journeys turn upon an

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

75

endemic tripartite association in the Kiowa imagination among the bear, the wilderness, and the underworld. I have encountered no ethnographic evidence indicating that the Kiowa conceive of the underworld in terms of a specific geographic space, and no evidence that it corresponds to the Yellowstone region that Momaday marks as their wilderness. The typology serves Momaday’s personal drama, in which he is nominated to undergo a hunt-marriage with the bear of Kiowa prehistory in order to become a storyteller. Momaday’s storytelling persona, as he describes it in such pieces as “The Arrowmaker” and “The Native American Voice in Literature,” is an adventurer who journeys into the unknown and returns from it transformed, much as his Kiowa ancestors found a way out of the tenebrous wildernessunderworld, while taking from the bear, whose power they envied, the impetus to self-transformation.31 In storytelling, Momaday says, “[E]verything is a risk,” a quest into “the unknown darkness,” wherein the storyteller “accepts peril alone” (“A,” 11, 12). The stories themselves contain a “riddle,” or “prism,” which not even the storyteller comprehends, and his relation to this unknown element alters with every imaginative act (“A,” 11). Like the Kiowa warriors, then, he is a transformational self, who never performs the same story twice.32 In his provisional identity and his bravery before the unknown, the storyteller harks back to a consciousness like that of “the soil, before the printing press” and to a belief “that proceeds from the depths of origin, from a genesis nearly beyond the reach of the imagination” (MMW, 85, 115). Casting the storyteller on the model of a Kiowa warrior from the wilderness, and presenting both in terms of a frontier narrative of ongoing self-realization, Momaday sanctifies as ancient the values central to a frontier narrative of self-genesis, while allowing him to assume the urgency and dynamism he finds lacking in the stereotype of the savage. His heroic storyteller can represent the essence of imagination, even as the act of storytelling continually transmutes him. When the primal unknown is figured as the bear, however, the storyteller’s adventure becomes infused with a violence that threatens to offset the regenerative effects of transformation. “The Arrowmaker” and “The Native American Voice in Literature” were written early in Momaday’s career, before he had begun to own the bear as the storyteller’s original double. In works before The Ancient Child, the bear is not the terrifying threat he poses in that novel. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Momaday had begun to formulate his personal version of the hunter myth as a far more harrowing ordeal, for the bear becomes his aggressor. During the draft stage of The Ancient Child, Momaday described an inner struggle between himself and the bear, who is his changeling: like Set, he is the latest reincarnation of the Kiowa bear-boy, who reappears in someone in every generation (AV, 15). Being the bear-boy is precarious, for the bear is both savage and inspiring: “There

76

Jason W. Stevens

is an energy, an agitation, an anger, perhaps. A power rises up in you and becomes dominant. . . . You feel strong when you’re most in touch with this bear. You become very intense in your work. And in your life. You accelerate your activity—writing, painting, whatever. You tend to be reckless, careless, self-destructive” (AV, 16). The bear amplifies his creativity but also pushes him towards dissolution. Momaday emphasizes that the bear-boy can be “torn apart” or “carried beside the thing into which he has been transformed” so that he must view it “with horror” (AV, 13). The bear’s presence transforms him, but the transformation is not complete and may leave him divided into a beast that was once himself and a spectator outside the beast. In either position, he is not whole, as though the purchase of bear-power is self-estrangement. Momaday insists that as an artist, he “is most alive” in this transformed, though contentious, state (AV, 52). In The Ancient Child, the bear is a buried part of Set that rises up against his Euro-American ego for betraying his Kiowa father’s memory and the experience of his father’s people. Raised by adoptive white parents, Set has been successfully assimilated, although he often wonders, “in pain,” who he is. He has, we are told, “an incomplete idea of himself ” (AC, 143–144). In the novel’s opening chapters he is an established, but disenchanted, modern artist who paints western landscapes but does not find himself anywhere in these works. Upon meeting the young medicine woman Grey, he begins to see figures and landscapes in his paintings that suggest the shadows into which the bear will fade at the end of the novel, and they look strangely familiar to him: “I dipped a brush in turpentine and moved the graphite around on the paper. Trees in shadow emerged, and a creeping figure among the trees. . . . ‘↜It’s a self-portrait,’ I said. . . . [It] expressed a certain reality in me” (AC, 143–144).33 Although his self-portraits resemble the bear in its wilderness setting, when Set begins having visions of the figure approaching him, he feels threatened with the loss of both power and identity. The struggle between man and bear meanwhile accelerates Set’s creative output and makes his art more “profound” and “lucid,” but it deprives him of voice (AC, 215–216). Voice, like transformation, is an elemental property of Kiowa identity in The Ancient Child: Grey knows her ancestral spirits by their voices, and Set remembers his Kiowa father as a voice. For Set to fail to regain his ancestral voice would be equivalent to losing his Kiowa identity. Momaday introduces a third agent, a “monstrous resistance,” which wedges between Set and his bear-self and thereby cuts him off from the source of his voice. An inhibitor of the bear, it is allied with Set’s corrupt Euro-American ego. Set sees the bear as his antagonist because he has misrecognized the false ego as himself, and the “monstrous resistance” enforces this identification by trying to forestall mediation by Set’s tribal memory. This inhibitor is nested inside Set along

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

77

with his bear-like double, and in the clash between the two, he is dispossessed of speech: The words were muffled and animal-like, groans and growls. And Set understood in another moment that the terrible sounds were in his own. It was he who wanted so desperately to speak and could not. To speak seemed the most important and necessary thing in his life, to rise from some profound and primitive helplessness to the level of speech, but he was prevented by some monstrous resistance in himself, it seemed. And the most terrible thing was, he did not even know what he wanted to say, had to say, if only he could. (AC, 73)

Set’s voice is suspended between the two agents, the one imagined as feral and inarticulate, the other as alien and repressive. Set confuses himself with his primitive and animal-like double, and he refers to it by the same pronoun. He speaks of the primitive having “words” of its own, but at the close of the passage, he confesses that he does not know what his primitive double would say if it were allowed to speak. It utters only growls and groans because, he imagines, it is stifled by the “monstrous” resister, and he cannot intuit the intent behind the primitive noises, because his sense is blocked by the same repressing agent. Following suit with Momaday’s previous protagonists, Set will ultimately have to return to the wilderness for a climactic confrontation with the bear and his “monstrous resistance,” which must be overcome. Whether or not Set emerges from the struggle possessing a Kiowa identity is critical, for Momaday’s own experience of self-transformation is rewritten in The Ancient Child. As I have shown, Momaday’s use of the Kiowa bear-boy myth is itself translated through the hunter myth and carries the paradox of that myth: origin-power and identity are at odds in the wilderness. Contrasting the bear-boy with Billy the Kid, Momaday implies a sequential model that casts Billy as the reduced changeling of his transformative precedents, the bear and the bear-empowered “storyteller,” with whom Momaday identifies through Set.34 The ultimate parity of Set’s fate with that of Billy the Kid, however, suggests that Momaday perhaps has become aware that the Kiowa voice he has claimed is elusive, because it is overdetermined by frontier archetypes and a construction of American selfhood that he has uneasily and incompletely assimilated. Billy versus the Bear The Ancient Child opens with the murder of Billy the Kid in a rancher’s dark doorway and closes with Set’s loss of human voice in the dimness of the

78

Jason W. Stevens

wild. Both scenes foreground the question of identity that haunts the novel, as the two figures each confront a dangerous alter ego. Billy the Kid turns to his killer, Sheriff Pat Garrett, in the darkness and asks, just before being gunned down: “Quien es?” (AC, 226). After he is overtaken by the bear, Set is estranged from human companions who can no longer comprehend his speech, and he then recedes into shadows, where he suffers “loneliness like death” (AC, 314). It is difficult not to see a parallel between Billy’s assassination and the loss of Set’s voice. Billy’s question is an allusion to the first line of Hamlet, and like the play, both his and Set’s stories are dramas of lost and ambiguous origin. Set’s name, meaning bear, designates his origin as the bear-wilderness; although Billy at times manifests traits of the bear, it is a figure into which the outlaw cannot transform. Billy the Kid, like Set, is of the bear, but his figure also “bodies resistance,” the Euro-American ego that opposes the bear and ultimately seeks death (AC, 187). The conclusion of the novel is startling, then, for it confuses Set with the outlaw, though the narrative is plotted to enunciate the differences in their relationship to the bear, and thus to a heroic Kiowa storyteller for which the bear is the primal energy. Momaday commonly discusses Billy and the bear-boy together, suggesting their association for him, even though Billy is “diametrically opposed” to the “Indian side” of him that the bear represents (AV, 13–36; C, 188). In an interview while drafting The Ancient Child, Momaday revealed that his obsession with the outlaw is anomalous and older even than his fascination with the bear-boy myth, for it goes back to his childhood when Billy was his imaginary friend.35 He now regards himself as one of the world’s authorities on Billy the Kid, and he has seen most of the forty-some movies about him (C, 231). Momaday remains fascinated by “an epic notion of heroism” at the center of the myth of Billy the Kid, though this heroism is inseparable from “an awful pain and rage” that determines Billy’s “whole destiny” and ends in his early, violent death (MMW, 209). Pain, rage, and violence also describe Set-Momaday’s experience with the bear, and in Momaday’s early work on Billy (before Momaday began to advertise himself as the bear-boy) one can see traces of Set’s drama in the outlaw’s depiction. From 1971 to 1972, Momaday published a collection of prose and poetry in the Sante Fe New Mexican under the title “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid.” The pieces alternate in tone, revealing various sides of Billy, but they are predominately tragic and elegiac. As he emerges, Billy is a marked man who sustains his individuality by repudiating the past and distrusting the future. Like Set, Billy in the poems is an orphan exiled from family and ancestry and burdened by a destiny he does not comprehend. In “He Foretells Disaster in a Dream,” Billy is suspicious of being stalked by an enemy larger than any human antagonist, even as Set is hunted by a

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

79

bear whose nature, at least initially, is beyond his comprehension. For both, moreover, speech is either withheld or threatened. Billy, like Set during his withdrawals, is laconic: “[T]he vagrant enemy” quells Billy’s speech so that he cannot even “cry out” his “doubt,” and Set’s voice is suspended when the bear clashes with his “resistance” (PS, 65). By the time Momaday wrote The Ancient Child almost twenty years later, his attitude toward Billy had shifted in deference to the bear-boy, who had become a mythic version of himself. “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid” is largely reproduced in the novel and its authorship attributed to the precocious half-Kiowa, half-Navajo woman Grey, who, when not dreaming of Billy the Kid, communes with ancestral spirits. In the fashion of a Southwestern humorist, Grey both mocks and cherishes conventions of pulp stories and films that perpetuate Billy’s legend. Grey’s affectionate but parodic style enables Momaday to take an ironic perspective on both Billy’s legacy and his own obsession with the outlaw. He notes that Grey’s outgrowing of her passion for Billy the Kid is a sign of her maturity: “Billy stands in the way of her becoming a medicine woman. . . . He serves a purpose in her imagination for a time, but he fulfills that purpose and is no longer necessary” (C, 199). Grey’s infatuation is a phase that prepares her to take more seriously the bear-boy myth in which she will play her adult role (as Set’s guide), while the writing of “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid” helps her to comprehend the correspondences and contrasts between Billy’s figure and the bear-boy. Through Grey’s example, Momaday indicates that while Billy’s myth remains a touchstone both for him and the American imagination, he is able to dream about Billy without being enthralled to the point of eclipsing his true destiny. As Grey’s dreams unravel, Billy’s legend expresses the devolution of “an epic notion of heroism” in the twentieth-century United States. Grey describes her collection of poems and prose on Billy as marking “the passing of an age,” echoing Walter Noble Burn’s elegiac notes on the Wild West in The Saga of Billy the Kid, the classic retelling that established the terms of the legend for Momaday’s generation (and which Grey has read and loved [AC, 17]). Burns’s saga is a progressivist romance that enfolds a centripetal movement describing the outlaw’s adherence to savagery and his consequent demise. Burns explicitly associates Billy with the wilderness and portrays him as the last vestige of “the spirit of primitive savagery.” In Burns’s saga, the Kid’s death in 1881 prophesies the official close of the frontier in 1893 and the close of a heroic age: “[It was] a swashbuckling and lawless frontier,” where a man like Billy could be worthy of the “Homeric succession.”36 That GreyMomaday should allude to Burns’s saga is significant, for Burns foresaw, with a pronounced nostalgia, that while the outlaw was the inheritor of the hunter tradition, he also marked its supplanting. The outlaw, of which Billy is the

80

Jason W. Stevens

classic mold, bears a sequential relationship to the Leatherstocking figure. While Leatherstocking became popular when the frontier was still a literal reality, the outlaw appealed to the public’s growing sense that the frontier had become merely a symbol, and his development from the late nineteenth century marks the widespread suspicion that the creative individualist was being subsumed by agencies beyond comprehension or control.37 Grey’s allusive remark about “the passing of an age,” then, refers not only to her adolescence but also to a heroic ideal.38 Her view of Billy sobers with her maturation into a medicine woman. Grey’s reveries on Billy are presented in two sets, the first largely romanticizing Billy and the second implying the darker image of the outlaw in the post–World War II era. In Grey’s early, romanticized visions of Billy, the boy-bandit wants to be a showman in defiance of death. That he will try to stage his own peril is implied in his declaration to Deputy Bell that “[t]he whole show is mine now,” as he improvises a romantic escape for the appreciation of the Lincoln townspeople: “The good citizens of Lincoln, New Mexico Territory, respectfully awaited the appearance of El Chivato [Billy the Kid]. . . . [T]here was a solemnity in the town, an air of grave celebration, as on a Day of the Dead” (AC, 89). Billy’s act braves and overcomes death, and, as such, his escape becomes a rite as much as a performance. He does not court doom but makes a show of its possibility. Olinger, for instance, envisions Billy as a death mask, as the boy-killer’s eyes merge in darkness and depth with the eyes of the shotgun muzzle poised to murder him. Taken together with the town’s reverence for the spectacle, the scene suggests that Billy dons the role of Death as well as its assayer in the masque he enacts.39 In his masquerade, Billy ensures his fame by improvising two archetypal roles, translating himself into a story chain that will necessarily be retold. He thus projects both himself and his audience beyond mortality. The references to performance, staging, and masks allude to Momaday’s storyteller persona, and, like the storyteller, Billy has some semblance of bearpower at this phase in Grey’s imagining. While she envisions Billy’s escape, the bandit picks up a gun stashed in the jailhouse bathroom and weighs it for bullets in a gesture that the narrator likens to a bear’s manipulation of its prey: “With his small white hands he handled it as a bear might handle a fish, with some sense of ancient respect, playfully and skillfully” (AC, 85). The bear and the bandit in the passage have a respect for mortality combined with an assurance of their own power over other mortal things, and they know their power so confidently that they can balance play and skill in their actions. To this extent, Billy—like the bear—resembles the storyteller who, similarly, “exercises nearly complete control over the storytelling experience” as he creates himself and his audience (AC, 2). Grey describes Billy’s attraction to an old storyteller’s performance: “The old man’s real existence was at

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

81

last invested in his stories; there he lived and not elsewhere. He was nothing so much as a story of himself, the telling of a tale to which the flesh gathered incidentally. It was no wonder Billy liked him.” The wordmaster appeals to Billy because he has the power to “create [him and Grey] over and over again in his stories, fashion[ing them] into a myriad wonderful things that [they] should not have otherwise been” (AC, 190). While he is in the presence of the storyteller, Billy transforms, a feat that his performance in the jailbreak accomplishes by translating him beyond mortality. Billy’s violence, which is his mode of performance, “has to do with legend,” as Grey says, “and with the way we must think of ourselves, we cowboys and Indians, we roughriders of the world” (AC, 181). At this point, Grey believes that Billy’s violence, like the bear’s, is central to storytelling. At other points in Grey’s dreams, Billy will not exercise the control he exhibits in his escape from the jail, and the ruthless style that apotheosizes him also begins to split him open, exposing a breach between his legend and a longing for inner continuity. In the poem “The Wound,” prophetic of Billy’s fall in heroic stature, Grey pictures the desperado lingering lovingly over a gaping leg wound he suffers during an escape from avenger Billy Matthews.40 Billy seeks in his wound the life principle that has driven him. In the poem’s guiding simile, he imagines the depth of the wound signifying “a deep disturbance and fascination in himself.” He wants, thus, to keep close to and to wonder about “the being” at the wound’s interior. Overcome by narcissistic desire, he longs to graft his mouth to the wound in a gesture both erotic and cannibalistic, for the wound’s warm, wet tissues are likened to a tempting, pared fruit, as well as to a mouth awaiting a kiss. Billy would even plant the wound, so that he could preserve the sensation of near self-union (AC, 61–71). In this imaginary moment, Billy, who mistrusts past and future, seeks his original inside himself, but his desire for union is actually a misprision of a rupture. In contrast to Set, Billy has no name or locus, such as the Kiowa wilderness, for the missing part of himself, so he must turn inward, literally to the wounds he suffers, to seek his center. His violent power provides him with legend but not self-identity. Grey’s collection, in fact, goes on to show that Billy’s violence expresses renunciation rather than adventure. He becomes more self-conscious of his destiny and, ultimately, falls in love with death. His restless, peremptory sexual relationships, such as his affairs with Anacita Chacon and Paulita Maxwell, typically transpire in the shadow of death. The only bond of permanency in Billy’s life is his and Pat Garrett’s mutual death-wish: “Death became a bond between them stronger than friendship” (AC, 193). In accepting a deathwish, Billy relinquishes the improvisational energy that Grey had taken for the storyteller’s power: “And at Sumner, in that last moment of my life, I understood something—the final futility of everything we do. I couldn’t help

82

Jason W. Stevens

myself. Maybe that is what death is to us, the sudden, absolute awareness that we can’t help ourselves. No one and nothing can help us. It is a moment of perfect helplessness. It is irresistible” (AC, 226). Unknowable and omnipresent death has become the only true agent, and it allows Billy to stop looking for his vagrant enemy: “I was falling, and I was dying, and I was dead. It was a strange thing, and it happened just in the nick of time, just as I asked who was there, ‘Quien es?’” (AC, 226). In this moment, Grey learns that Billy has lost his bravery, though Billy has himself already confessed as much just before narrating his death. Earlier, when Grey compares Billy to one of Set’s Kiowa ancestors, Set-Angya (“a man of bear-power”), Billy contradicts her, and points out that Set-Angya was brave, whereas he, himself, killed men out of fear (AC, 223, 225). From mournful orphan to despairing killer, Billy finally emerges as a crisis figure. The “bear-power” aspects of Billy—his improvisation, his command, his love of risk—that characterize both the Kiowa and the American hero give way to their contraries: evasion, displacement, and recklessness unto a death-wish. The estranged and spectral Billy who narrates his own saving death signifies the failure of Americans to generate a unique idea of themselves. In his essay “The American West and the Burden of Belief ” (1997), Momaday scathingly comments that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which emerged at about the period of Billy’s death, is symbolic of the effete indulgence in frontier simulacra attending the U.S. fin-de-siècle and extending to the present: What we have in this explosion of color and fanfare is an epic transformation of the American West into a traveling circus and of an American hero into an imitation of himself. Here is a theme with which we have become more than familiar. We have seen the transformation take place numberless times on the stage, on television and on movie screens, and on the pages of comic books, dime novels, and literary masterpieces. (MMW, 96)

The Wild West show epitomizes what Momaday calls in The Ancient Child “resistance” (AC, 183). It is an egoistic frame of reference that violently transforms its environment in order “to accommodate only its presence, to save itself ” (MMW, 106) as when Billy adheres strictly to his “own mean principle of survival.” Momaday goes on in the essay to indict nineteenth-century photographs, with their picture planes of figures against a landscape, as “self-fabricated reflections” in which “we become our own frame of reference” and forget what was, in reality, a “wild, definitively wild landscape.” Referring to Buffalo Bill in Arthur Kopit’s play Indians (1969), Momaday says that such figures signify a reduction in our sense of ourselves:

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

83

“He is constrained to translate his real heroism into false and concentrated reflection of itself ” (MMW, 97). The commodification of the wilderness and the frontiersman as symbols is indicative of a loss of imaginative power, no better exemplified than in the homogenization of “wilderness” within Set’s modern art community. The aesthetes who orbit Sante Fe, San Francisco, and Paris are yearning for an authentic experience of wilderness they are incapable of feeling. When given audience to Set’s paintings of shadowy man-beasts and wild landscapes, Jason Fine, Lola Bourne, and Alais Sancerre seize upon the suggestion of transformation as the most significant aspect of the work, but they respond with a perfunctory and exhausted rhetoric of sublimity. Art critic Jason Fine, for instance, speaks of painting “in terms of clichés. This landscape of Indian red, Mars yellow, and burnt umber would be in Jason’s terms brooding, vast, uncompromising, preeminently honest, and commensurate with man’s capacity for wonder” (AC, 58). Jason’s remarks are clichés of a bygone era. His first four adjectives belong to American romanticism of the nineteenth century, and his final phrase alludes to the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, in which the resigned modern narrator recalls that romantic vision with irony and nostalgia. The reference to Fitzgerald is telling, as it marks the reduction of a wilderness ideal to a self-consciously compensatory fiction—a vision to which Nick Carraway retreats from the present and in which he may not really believe. Carraway settles on “wonder” to veil the impossibility of regenerative transformation in the modern age. Jason and his fellow art fans apparently have grown so apprehensive that some potential might exist beyond customary appearances that they summarily employ the rhetoric of sublimity to veil their anxiety, but without any of Carraway’s irony. In contrast to his fellow moderns, Set is ineluctably drawn to an “aesthetic of wilderness” that expresses the bear-power latent in him (AC, 57). En route to his father’s homeland in Oklahoma, Set looks out the window of the airplane and sees a city skyline that reminds him of the resistance in the art world, but then he turns to the wooded landscape at the city’s outskirts: “Oh, but there, he thought, look; there is exception and redemption, a redeeming disorder, the opposing aesthetic of the wilderness—the green belts slashing through the boxes like limbs of lightning. . . . Look, he said to himself, the wild, crooked courses reaching in every direction. Water follows the line of least resistance, and it is itself irresistible. It has shaped some of the most impressive forms on earth” (AC, 57–58). Here again, drawing an antagonism between the city and the woods, Momaday opposes wilderness to civilization, but much pressure is on the contrast here, for the city skyline is coded as the line of resistance for a society that has lost all rapport with the natural world. The passage holds out the possibility of “a line of least resistance,” presumably the natural contour of the woods and river. This line

84

Jason W. Stevens

would not be a renunciation of power, for it “has shaped many impressive forms.” In fact, it is aggressively irresistible, “slashing” into the hard lines and extending its own in multiple directions. The wilderness aesthetic promises a redemption, although Set, at this point, cannot comprehend what that redemption would comprise. Set’s paintings illustrate, without his deliberation, redemptive values that Momaday has defined as Kiowa.41 The paintings depict “indistinct, subliminal” figures of men on horses caught up in swirls of earth colors, each describing a succession of distances in which the figure recedes: “One had to look closely, steadily, in order to see what was there” (AC, 159). The paintings show centaurs (associated with both the Kiowa and Billy, in his romantic postures) in the process of transformation—not against the earth but within it, and, like the earth, in a perpetual state of motion. They compel the viewer to enact the bear-power of the centaur while reading the picture. In order not to be displaced constantly along the swirls in search of a vantage point, the eye must particularize incisively. In the process, the viewer moves throughout the painting, convening sets of space—moving successively from the indistinct to the newly recognizable with each change of emphasis. The principle of transformation, then, promises control within self-completed designs, distinction in the face of the unknown. Set’s art is self-integrative, and it identifies both creator and viewers (if they are perceptive enough) as members of a warriorclass of Indians who are more authentic American heroes than either Buffalo Bill or Billy the Kid. Before Set can fulfill the promise of transformation offered in his art, he has to journey toward the mountains with Grey, who reveals the meaning of his name and teaches him that he is the bear-boy. Grey, now a mature medicine woman, teaches Set that in order for him to achieve his destiny, he must somehow cease to resist and must give himself over to the bear temporarily. His ego-self must be annihilated, so he will undergo a ritual in which he will be literally beaten out of self-consciousness. After Grey and Set return to Devil’s Tower, the cowboy Perfecto Atole, riding on horseback armed with the bear’s paw (signifying the Kiowa horsemen who own bear power), beats Set to a point of rage and humiliation. Throughout this rite and others, Grey explains to Set that he is preparing to make an act of “renunciation.” He is being primed as a shaman-like figure, offering his body to the bear in order to acquire bear magic. Grey has signified already that Set is a shaman, for under the guidance of Grandmother Spider, she has given him a medicine bundle containing the bear paw. According to some interpretations, a shaman’s death enables the acquisition of magical and healing power, and the death is a rite of passage, for the shaman is reborn.42 Overlaying the bear-boy myth with shamanistic elements seems a means not only of further opposing Set to Billy’s mortal fate but also of differentiating him from the hunter figure. The hunter

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

85

never sacrifices himself to the beast he hunts, and having died, he is never reborn; as I have shown, his approximation of spiritual rebirth is killing. Blending the shaman into Set’s figure, however, only makes the ending of the novel more perplexing, for Set is not reborn nor does he receive magic power. After months in the mountains, he receives the vision of the bear in the shape of a shadow falling against the Tower, and he is suddenly overwhelmed by the bear’s power, which transforms him into the mythic creature. This ending seems to fulfill what the hunter myth never could: a pure relation of descent to the wild, but that “romance” is contravened by irony, for Set is blinded and deprived of voice.43 His senses of smell and of sound are enhanced a thousandfold, but his vision and voice—those qualities toward which the bear impelled his Kiowa ancestors—are lost. Startlingly, the return to the wild and the achievement of Kiowa identity have diverged. Set has become the bear, but he cannot articulate this identity once it has been assumed; moreover, he has lost the powers of expression he possessed as an artist. Deprived of human attributes, he is seemingly cut off from culture, both the ancestral culture he is supposed to be recovering and modern U.S. culture from which he has retreated. His recession into the shadows is less an image of healing or redemption than it is an uncanny inversion of Billy’s death-release from “resistance.” True, the reader is given to understand that since Set has become the bear, he should have the power to inspire future hearers of the myth and thereby to continue the mythic cycle of conversion. It is all the more telling, then, that Momaday chooses to leave Set not with an envisioned community but with “a loneliness like death” (AC, 314). Set’s future is as tenuous as the shadows that envelope him. Momaday is evasive about the meaning of the ending: “What does it mean? I don’t know. . . . I don’t want to know. . . . What stage is he in?. . . . There is this isolation. He is retreating somehow from the human world into some other dimension of existence, and the question is: does he complete that crossing or is there some intervention?” (C, 207). Avowing the indeterminacy of the ending, Momaday says that it is faithful to the limits of his own vision. When taken over by the bear, he cannot know exactly what he becomes, nor can Set. Furthermore, Momaday leaves open the possibility that the crossing into this other dimension may not be completed, because a third term, unidentified, might intervene. It is not clear whether Momaday understands the intervention as saving or obstructive. One is left to wonder whether the interventionary term would be Set’s “monstrous resistance” reasserting itself or whether it would be something redeeming Set from the loss of voice and vision. In either case, minus the intervention, Set becomes dissociated from human culture. Momaday’s speculation over the ending may also be a necessary deferral, for contrary to the heroics of self-invention, he may be grappling with the prospect that his Kiowa identity cannot be completely

86

Jason W. Stevens

realized in the form he has chosen. Since House Made of Dawn, Momaday often has described himself or his heroes as passing through a hypostasized unknown to recover a Kiowa descent, and these origins are symbolized by the bear-wilderness, which itself is characterized by mystery. In The Ancient Child, “transformation” is a principle constantly mustered to describe contact with a Kiowa descent, but the other dimension of experience into which the protagonist transforms is as indistinct as the wild. Merging frontier narrative into the drama of recovering Kiowaness, Momaday has attempted to make compatible self-transformation and the return of ancestry, states normally posed as antitheses for the Indian in the minds of whites. In so doing, he has tried to write a narrative of created identity that would transcend the savage trope and its polarization of “civilized” and Indian characters. At the same time, Momaday has not been entirely content with the conception of cultural identity sustained through reinvention and syncretism, since the claim for created identity has existed alongside his assertion of its inescapable native origin, even if this is an origin defined by its amorphousness. That this origin should seem unformed could suggest a strategic move to keep the Kiowa an open category against the pressure of the long-standing symbol of Indian-Nature synthesis. This interpretation in itself, however, cannot account for the foreordination of his Kiowa origin’s return and the psychic violence it wreaks. Although Momaday may will an ancestral return, I submit that this return nonetheless threatens despecification and estrangement insofar as it is freighted with the liabilities, for Native Americans, of the frontier myth that Momaday has adapted as a focal narrative frame. The outcome of The Ancient Child may register Momaday’s internalization of the longing for an authentic Indian identity, as popularly represented, even as he resists this image and recognizes its danger. This hazard is augmented by the very tropes he chooses to mark his own and the Kiowa’s odyssey; by incorporating the return-to-wilderness motif, he draws himself centripetally to Nature, the very category that historically has been deployed to interpret Native Americans while voiding their volition to name themselves. Thus I return to a tension present in Momaday’s career from its inception. His figures of transformation can express his Kiowa-ness as a process rather than a state of being, and to this extent, he would seem to be closer to a postmodern version of Native American identity like that expressed by his contemporary Gerald Vizenor. At the same time, unlike Vizenor, Momaday also asserts his ancestral identity as a motive force moving within the transformative process and cyclically retracing its tendency back to the wild. So long as Momaday depends on essentializing analogies between the modern and an ancient anterior, his heroes are subjects of removed origin. The loss of positive ancestral antecedent is a cause for mourning or tragedy in Momaday’s imagination, and the

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

87

tragic and elegiac chords of his work subdue the sense of victory he elsewhere sounds when describing the heroic conquest of his ancestors’ imagination or the ancestral storyteller’s agility before his audience. That Momaday’s attempt to revise the hunter for the ends of his own self-presentation should ultimately collapse into the estranged outlaw’s destiny perhaps expresses his painful understanding that the hunter is no more allowed to unify with the savage and the wilderness than he is allowed to wholly return to a Kiowa derivation imagined in the wilderness. The ending of The Ancient Child, with Set overpowered, suggests that Momaday also is protesting the constriction of his representational power. Envisioning the Kiowa as both his elders and quintessential American heroes, Momaday is making claims to a figure of agency that he understandably would covet. In the white American imagination, this hero has the ability to mimic savage traits while choosing to be non-native and reserving his right to remake himself into whatever the wild opens to him. Ironically, in his absolute opportunism, selecting from both white-civilized and savage-wild identities, he represents a radical version of the American self. White Americans, however, have denied Native Americans the same privilege of self-definition, even as the Indian has continued to symbolically serve their nostalgia for the drama of attaining their volitional American identities. For Momaday, then, his imagined Kiowa at times may seem foreign, even though he owns the Kiowa as his kinsmen, for he has adapted them for a narrative tradition that has not accorded to Native Americans the agency he wants to claim through his ancestry. The ending of The Ancient Child perhaps indicates that his ethnic identity, in this heroic version, is experienced rather as an ethnic persona. Like Buffalo Bill in Kopit’s play, the Kiowa storyteller may seem a false imitation of the American hero whom Momaday can appropriate and may even covet, but that he has not become. That Momaday permits such irony to surface at the close of The Ancient Child, rather than providing a utopian denouement, can be appreciated as a mark of his artistic honesty. It urges one to entertain the notion that even given the possibilities that the idea of cultural re-invention provides, the frontier myth’s model for the genesis of American selfhood may resist adaptation to terms amenable to the formation of viable identities, both Indian and American. Since the frontier hero’s progress is predicated on both his identification with the Indian (as source) and his progress beyond the Indian (as savage), the Native American adapting the myth for his insertion as an ethnic American risks splitting his self-image into a descent-based character and that character’s negation, rather than describing a consenting self-identity. Momaday’s representational practices are syncretic and reinventive, but the frontier tropology of his narratives seems at times to throw doubt on his vital imaginative impulses and to divide his art internally along the fiction of Indian authenticity. Momaday

88

Jason W. Stevens

oscillates between whether authenticity can be affirmed in some form (the drive towards wilderness) or whether it must be alienated as colonial fiction; the latter alternative threatens to make a pseudonym of his origin and open in its place an agency that may appear to him only nominal by comparison with its non-Indian heroic alternative. When Grey, in The Ancient Child, inquires of her ancestral grandmother’s spirit whether Set is the bear, she asks questions that still hold at the novel’s close: “What is his great pain? Does he know what he is?” (AC, 116). In one of the most poignant passages of The Names, Momaday recalls a moment in his childhood when he was asked what a Kiowa is and if he could be that as well as American. He remembers responding falteringly: “[W]ell yes ma’am I am Kiowa. . . . yes ma’am I am proud to be an American. . . . Oh I feel so dumb I can’t answer all those questions I don’t know how to be a Kiowa” (N, 101). During Momaday’s childhood, Billy the Kid was a role more real to him than the Kiowa Indian, and Billy remains ingrained in Momaday’s personal myth. The bitter displacement of identity at the core of the outlaw’s story is perhaps as telling of Momaday’s labor for ethnic definition as the myth of transformation that the Kiowa bear fails to fulfill.

No t e s 1. N. Scott Momaday, interview with Dagmar Weiler, spring 1986, in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, ed. Matthias Schubnell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 168–169. Further references to Conversations will be cited parenthetically in the text as C. 2. Momaday, interview with Charles Woodard, 1989, Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 39. Further references to Ancestral Voice will be cited parenthetically in the text as AV; all interviews in Ancestral Voice are with Charles Woodard. 3. See Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in the text as OD. See also James Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); Matthias Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985); Woodard, Ancestral Voice; H. David Brumble’s chapter “N. Scott Momaday: Oral to Written Tradition,” in his American Indian Autobiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 165–180. In contrast to these critics, Arnold Krupat argues that Momaday is uncharacteristic of other Native American writers insofar as his style mimics the style of “romantic mythicism,” which has no counterpart in oral discourse (see The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989], 132–201). 4. See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

89

╇ 5. See Jane Sequoya, “How(!) Is an Indian? A Contest of Stories,” in New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism, ed. Arnold Krupat (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 459. ╇ 6. Like the majority of contemporary Native Americans, Momaday lives off reservation, but he maintains contact with Kiowa following more traditional lifestyles. A member in the Kiowa Gourd Clan, he participates in the annual Gourd dances and Black Leggings dances (see “An Interview with Gary Kodaseet,” in Approaches to Teaching N. Scott Momaday’s “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” ed. Kenneth M. Roemer [New York: Modern Language Association, 1988], 145–152). ╇ 7. See Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (1965; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). (The 1965 edition is a revised version of Pearce’s The Savages of America [1953].) ╇ 8. See Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 191. For a discussion of the Indian’s ideological function in U.S. nationalisms as a pre-given ethnicity, see Sollors’s chapter “Romantic Love, Arranged Marriage, and Indian Melancholy,” 102–130; Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18 (summer 1992): 655–685; and Walter Benn Michaels, “The Vanishing American,” American Literary History 2 (summer 1990): 220–241. ╇ 9. Momaday, postscript to “The Morality of Indian Hating,” in The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 57. Further references to The Man Made of Words will be cited parenthetically in the text as MMW. 10. Momaday, The Names: A Memoir (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976), 25. Further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in the text as N. 11. See Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); and Paul Seydor, Peckinpah: The Western Films, A Reconsideration, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 309–329. 12. Momaday, Interview with Laura Coltelli, 1989, Conversations, 159–160. 13. See Kathleen Donovan, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 92–93. Momaday’s lecture is printed in Poetics and Politics: A Series of Readings by Native American Writers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 23–24. 14. Momaday, quoted in Donovan, Feminist Readings, 93. The prolific Ned Buntline wrote frontier adventure stories with lurid titles such as Red Warrior, or Stella Dolormes, Comanche Lover: A Romance of Savage Chivalry (1874). 15. See Slotkin, Regeneration, 498–499. 16. For an overview of the outlaw figure, see Stephen Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982). 17. For an example of the comparison of Billy to the Kiowa, see “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid,” in In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997): “We two came to a good understanding of each other, I believe. I did a lot of riding in those days, and I got to be very good at it. My Kiowa ancestors, who were centaurs, should have been proud of me” (46–47). See also The Ancient Child, where Grey pauses during the writing of

90

Jason W. Stevens

her own tale of Billy the Kid and drifts into a reverie of Kiowa warriors wandering on horseback (New York: Harper and Collins, 1989), 220–221. Further references to The Ancient Child will be cited parenthetically in the text as AC; further references to In the Presence of the Sun will be cited parenthetically in the text as PS. 18. On the question of Native American authenticity, see Sequoya, “How(!) Is an Indian?” 453–473. Momaday addresses similar issues in Ancestral Voice, ed. Woodard (see especially 199–200) and in his keynote address and panel discussion at the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars in 1968 (Indian Voices, Proceedings of the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars [San Francisco, Calif.: Indian Historian Press, 1968], 48–84). 19. This version of the Seven Sisters myth is the prologue to The Ancient Child. In some variants, the child who becomes a bear is a girl rather than a boy. For an example of this variant and a much more eventful story, see Maurice Boyd, Kiowa Voices: Myths, Legends, and Folktales (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1983), 88–93. 20. Apart from the connection to Momaday’s sense of his personal “bear power,” Set also resembles Momaday in his enthusiasm for painting (which Momaday took up in the late seventies with artist Leonard Baskin); in his grief over the death of his mentor Bent Sandridge (a faintly disguised portrait of Yvor Winters, who advised Momaday’s career at Stanford); and in his crisis over the death of his Kiowa father (Momaday’s own father, Alfred Momaday, died in 1981). Set is summoned to his father’s ancestral land upon the death of his grandmother Kope-mah. Momaday, too, returned to the Washita Valley upon the death of Aho, his grandmother on his father’s side. As in Set’s story, Momaday says that his rediscovery of the Kiowa began with the grandmother’s death. 21. For a discussion of Euro-American senses of â•›“wilderness” as unconditioned, primordial nature, see Roderick Nash’s Wilderness in the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 45–83. 22. The animal world in Native American oral stories is not the precultural point of origin or the site of subhuman nature that Momaday’s mythic bear suggests of the wild. Karl Kroeber argues that for traditional Indians, bears not only understand human language but possess a language and a culture of their own. Kroeber shows that Indians do not perceive impassable barriers between bear culture and human culture but, rather, respected borders between the two (Artistry in Native American Myths [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998], 95–176). David Rockwell has shown that the bear in oral stories hosts a variety of characters, such that it is second in range of personality only to humans (Giving Voice to Bear [Toronto, Canada: Roberts Rhinehart International, 1991], 145). Many tribes refer to the bear by names of kinship, a custom that may be more typically and closely associated with the bear than with other animals (see A. Irving Hallowell, “Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere,” American Anthropologist 28 [January–March 1926]: 2–175, especially 43–53). This is not to deny the bear’s fierceness or its association with malevolence and death in many tribes of the southwestern plains (Rockwell, Giving Voice, 51); see also Susan Scarberry-García, Landmarks of Healing: A Study of “House Made of Dawn” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 64–65. The Kiowa, for instance, have conceived the bear as a sacred creature and possessor of magic that can drive men crazy or kill them (see Alice Marriott, Plains Indian Mythology [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975], 38–39; and ScarberryGarcía, Landmarks of Healing, 49). Even these mysterious and violent attributes do

Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology

91

not eliminate the bear’s personality or dissociate it from culture in traditional Indian stories. There is simply no Indian analogue for the voiceless, primitive creature that Momaday describes as the bear. 23. In a 1986 interview with Louis Owens, Momaday expresses admiration for Faulkner’s story and states that he read it “very early on” (C, 178–191). In an interview in 1993 with Camille Adkins, Momaday includes “The Bear” with The Sound and the Fury as “one of the great books of the century,” expressing the wish that he had written both (C, 219). 24. In the 1986 interview with Louis Owens, Momaday refers to Francisco’s hunt under the title “The Bear and the Colt,” which, after its publication in House Made of Dawn, was later published separately in an anthology of Native American short fiction (American Indian Authors, ed. N. Scott Momaday [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972], 119–131); see C, 75. 25. See Marriott, Plains Indian Mythology, 35. 26. Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 131. 27. Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 8. 28. Ibid., 6–7. 29. Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 202. 30. Matthias Schubnell has discussed the intertextual relationship between Francisco’s bear hunt and Faulkner’s story (see N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background, 70, 271). 31. See Momaday, “The Native American Voice in Literature” and “The Arrowmaker” in Man Made of Words, 13–20 and 9–12, respectively. “The Arrowmaker” was originally published as “The Story of Arrowmaker,” New York Times Book Review, 4 May 1969, 2; further references to “The Arrowmaker” will be to the essay in Man Made of Words and will be cited parenthetically in the text as “A.” 32. See Daniele Fiorentino, “The Native American Writer as Cultural Broker: An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” SAIL 8 (winter 1996): 68. 33. During the composition and publication of The Ancient Child, Momaday painted two self-portraits (in 1988 and 1989), both portraying a bear only. The portraits resemble those attributed to Set in The Ancient Child: studies in charcoal of huge creatures with paws upraised, as though poised for violence. 34. Momaday uses the storyteller loosely to describe artists (writers, painters, oral performers) who manifest the attributes of his imagined Kiowa ancestors. The application of the term to Set is not arbitrary. 35. For Momaday’s discussion of his fascination with Billy the Kid, see Conversations, 231; The Names, 111; Presence of the Sun, 45–47; and Ancestral Voice, 22–27. 36. Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927), 52, 29, 69. 37. See Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid, 43, 116–136. 38. In her meditation on the “admixture of the violent and the benign” in the American imagination, Grey alludes to four of the most famous movie versions of Billy’s legend, each marking off decades from the Cold War to Vietnam, an interval during which Billy’s character becomes increasingly withdrawn from a claustrophobic world: “Sometimes she saw Billy as Marlon Brando or Paul Newman or Kris Kristoffersen, for each of these men had in his own way reflected some vital

92

Jason W. Stevens

truth at the core of the myth. But most often she thought of Audie Murphy” (AC, 189). Each actor’s name alludes to a film: Murphy to Kurt Neumannn’s The Kid from Texas (1950), Newman to Arthur Penn’s The Left-Handed Gun (1958), Brando to his own One-Eyed Jacks (1961), and Kristoffersen to Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Billy ranges in these characterizations from “an alienated youth betrayed by his society and troubled within” to a volatile sociopath to a decadent, strident antihero (Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid, 130). 39. The theatrical metaphors in these scenes are lifted from Burns, who describes Billy as a master showman performing with Death on a stage set by Fate (The Saga of Billy the Kid, 53–54, 169, 249–250, 280). The allusions point out that this is the heroic vision of Billy, in contrast to the sober one that will emerge later in Grey’s imaginings. 40. The poem in The Ancient Child was originally published separately as “The Wound,” in The Gourd Dancer (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); it was not featured in the Santa Fe New Mexican’s version of “The Strange and True Life of Billy the Kid.” For the publication history of the poem, see Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, 247. 41. Schubnell offers a parallel reading of these paintings (see “Locke Setman, Emil Nolde, and the Search for Expression in N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child,” American Indian Quarterly 18 [fall 1994]: 469–480). 42. As a visionary who has contact with healing agents, the shaman seems part of the novel’s “healing motif ” (C, 210). In some tribes, shamans who have the bear as a spirit helper keep “bear claws and teeth and other parts of the animal” in their medicine bundles (Rockwell, Giving Voice, 64). Set’s bundle contains a grizzly paw, marking the source of his abilities (AC, 242). When on power quests, shamans, like Set, take sojourns in areas far beyond the community, but while the shaman’s sojourn requires suffering and even figurative death, it is not renunciative of the speech that enables communication between the shaman and his tribe. The powers he acquires are used for healing the sick, aiding the hunt, or contacting spirits concerning the future (Rockwell, Giving Voice, 66–68); but see also Willard Z. Park, Shamanism in Western North America (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1938); and Paula Gunn Allen’s discussion of shamans, which criticizes aspects of Rockwell’s interpretation, particularly his suggestion that Native American ideas of “bear-medicine” reflect primitive, associational thought (Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons [Boston: Beacon Press, 1998], 40–57]). 43. Louis Owens and Arnold Krupat overlook the irony of the ending in their portrayal of Set’s transformation as a romantic fulfillment. Only Helen Jaskoski has noted that the ending poses a problem (see Owens, Other Destinies, 126–127; Krupat, The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press], 42; and Jaskoski, “The Ancient Child: A Note on the Autobiographical Background,” SAIL 2 [winter 1990]: 14–16).

Ack now l e d gme n t I would like to thank my adviser, Karl Kroeber; Jonathan Levin; Rachel Adams; and James C. Ransom, who advised an earlier version of this project at Haverford College.

J oseph L . C oulombe

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie’s Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

I

n Sherman Alexie’s recent directorial debut, The Business of Fancydancing (viewed in April, 2002, at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema), the primary character, Seymour, is a Spokane Indian who moves to Seattle to attend college and pursue fame as a poet.1 Many of his Indian friends who remain on the reservation accuse him of selling out to white society. To a degree the film investigates Alexie’s own choices and their repercussions. Although he often earns praise as a clever manipulator of language, Alexie, like Seymour, is also censured for his depictions of Indians and Indian culture, particularly from other Indian writers. His critics characterize his writing as harmful pandering to white expectations, arguing that Alexie not only avoids the moral and social obligation to educate white readers and reinstill cultural pride in Indian readers, he also works actively against such goals with his humor. For example, Louis Owens writes that Alexie’s humor “deflects any ‘lesson in morality’” (76); Gloria Bird decries Alexie’s characters as “social and cultural anomalies” (49); and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that he neglects “art as an ethical endeavor or the artist as responsible social critic” (126). To many critics his playfulness may demonstrate skill as a writer, but it betrays Indian people by presenting them as clichés who deserve to be laughed at.

American Indian Quarterly, Volume 26, Number 1 (Winter 2002): pp. 94–115. Copyright © 2002 University of Nebraska Press.

93

94

Joseph L. Coulombe

In this essay I will argue that Alexie’s humor is central to a constructive social and moral purpose evident throughout his fiction but particularly in his collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. He uses humor—or his characters use humor—to reveal injustice, protect selfesteem, heal wounds, and create bonds. The function of humor changes from scene to scene, shifting to serve these myriad goals. In Indi’n Humor Kenneth Lincoln explains the many different roles of humor within Indian communities. He describes “the contrary powers of Indian humor” as “[t]he powers to heal and to hurt, to bond and to exorcize, to renew and to purge” (5). Like the legendary Trickster figure, humor in Indian communities embodies shifting meanings and serves conflicting ends. However, rather than a sign of his “hip” irreverence for all things Indian, Alexie’s sophisticated use of humor unsettles conventional ways of thinking and compels re-evaluation and growth, which ultimately allows Indian characters to connect to their heritage in novel ways and forces non-Indian readers to reconsider simplistic generalizations. In his best work to date, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, humor allows his characters to display strengths and hide weaknesses, to expose prejudices and avoid realities, and to create bonds and construct barricades. These “contrary powers” often coexist simultaneously, requiring the characters and readers to position and then reposition themselves within shifting personal and cultural contexts. Alexie’s cross-cultural humor alternately engages readers—creating positive connections between individuals of diverse backgrounds—and disrupts communities (both Indian and white), erecting barriers that make constructive communication difficult. Here lies its principle challenge for readers. Alexie’s shifting treatment of humor serves as a means of connection as well as an instrument of separation. However, it is precisely this complexity and plasticity that allow him to negotiate successfully the differences between Indian communities and mainstream American society, while simultaneously instigating crucial dialogue about social and moral issues especially important to Indian communities. Humor is defined by its fluidity, its paradoxes, and its ability to surprise. In a discussion of Native American Indian creativity in Mixedblood Messages, Louis Owens helpfully conceptualizes a literary postmodern “frontier” as “always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate” (26). More importantly, within this “frontier” exists “the dangerous presence of that trickster at the heart of the Native American imagination” (26). Owens argues that contemporary Indian writers create an inclusive frontier comprised of diverse perspectives resistant to one-dimensional definitions. This frontier is not easy or absolute; it changes and challenges. Whereas Frederick Jackson Turner had defined the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” thus creating a simple binary that

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

95

presupposes conflict, Owen’s “frontier” is a polyglot intellectual borderland that resists limiting stereotypes and definitions. I contend that Alexie’s brand of humor, more than others perhaps, is “that trickster at the heart of the Native American imagination.” As such, it embodies the potential for facilitating mutual understanding and respect between diverse peoples. By exploding expectations and compelling dialogue, humor teaches self-knowledge and social awareness, much like Trickster. Alexie’s use of humor encourages readers to think anew by creating a space of shared inquiry and reciprocal empathy. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the power of laughter generates “a crude zone of contact” that “demolishes fear and piety,” allowing the “absolutely free investigation” of its subject (23). Alexie’s humor creates that zone—or offers that space—to his readers. He provides an emotional and intellectual meeting ground for his readers to reconsider reductive stereotypes and expectations. While Owens defines the frontier as “a multidimensional zone of resistance” for Indians (41), Alexie uses humor to add a new element to it, one that extends beyond resistance (although that is certainly part of it). Alexie challenges readers of diverse backgrounds to join together to re-evaluate past and present ideologies. Humor generates a freely occupied space in which readers can begin sorting through the myriad connections and disconnections that face us all today. Stephen Evans, in an evaluation of Alexie’s refashioning of stereotypes (particularly that of the “drunken Indian”), correctly notes how satire compels “the collaborative making of meaning between Alexie and his readers” (54). Readers are not passive receptacles; they engage, question, resist, learn, and grow during the reading process. They join Alexie on Owen’s “frontier” and in Bakhtin’s “zone” to hash out interpretations to the past, responses to the present, and prospects for the future. This delicate alliance between author and audience—facilitated in large part by humor—promises to be more effective than purely logical, historical, or traditional efforts to promote understanding. With its shifting layers and elaborate surprises, Alexie’s humor disrupts readers’ complacency and necessitates analysis, clarification, and, ultimately, identification. Aware of his rigorous demands on readers, Alexie anticipates his critics and candidly demonstrates the ambiguity and difficulty of responding constructively to humor. In “A Drug Called Tradition,” the second story in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, readers are thrust into the middle of a wild party thrown by Thomas, who received some money from a power company that ran its line across his land. However, as Victor senses, the revelry feels tainted: “When Indians make lots of money from corporations that way, we can all hear our ancestors laughing in the trees. But we never can tell whether they’re laughing at the Indians or the whites. I think they’re laughing at pretty much everybody” (13). Victor admits his own ambivalence about the situation (and its humor), expressing uncertainty about whether he benefits

96

Joseph L. Coulombe

from the money or whether he is harmed by it. Significantly, he focuses on his ancestors’ reaction, a response that suggests the importance of generational connections to him. He wants to feel some alliance with past Indians, to share with them a triumph over white dominance (however small). Yet Victor senses that perhaps he is the target of their laughter. His misgiving illustrates the problem many critics have with Alexie. They cannot be confident who or what represents his satiric target. Reviewing Reservation Blues, Gloria Bird laments, “To derive meaning from the novel for the native audience is to become lost in its ambiguity of purpose” (52). Readers prefer assurance and certainty, but instead they hear laughter, and its target is indefinite and shifting. Like the Trickster figure, Alexie rarely offers an easy moral-to-the-story; the questions he raises—and the world he depicts—have few simple answers. Like many readers Victor is initially confused by his options. On one level he appears eager to laugh at the white companies who cough up cash to his friends; on another level he is unsettled by the idea that power lines dissect Indian land. The double meaning of the “power lines” underscores how white society exerts its power to divide Indian land and, in effect, disconnect Indians from their heritage. Alexie’s caustic humor shows how the situation cuts both ways. His unflinching portrayal of Victor’s discomforting new knowledge serves a vital function: readers have ventured onto Alexie’s rendering of Owen’s “frontier,” and we are forced to recognize its ambiguity and to evaluate our uneasiness. By creating situations that resist formulaic responses, Alexie fits into a longstanding tradition of Indian storytelling.2 In Native American Renaissance, Kenneth Lincoln describes “Old Man,” or Trickster, as one who “makes up reality as people unfortunately know it, full of surprises and twists, contrary, problematical” (123). Evaluating a Blackfoot story, Lincoln writes, “A ‘married’ dialectic of absurd initial impressions distorts the world comically, then must be corrected by a firmer sense of why-thingsare-what-they-are” (151). Likewise, the painful and wrenching realization of possible complicity—accentuated by ancestral laughter—provokes Alexie’s readers to rethink the circumstances that allow the sad and sardonic humor. In short, our reality is distorted and needs to be “corrected.” However, Alexie does not abandon readers. Instead Victor himself demonstrates how this “correction” might work. Recognizing his separation from his ancestors, he ultimately accepts (albeit uneasily) the importance of their traditions, particularly that of story-telling. He acknowledges the value of Thomas’s vision of sobriety and traditionalism, and he acquires a stronger connection to tribal elder and spiritual leader, Big Mom. If he had not been discomfited by the duplicitous nature of laughter, Victor would have remained closed to the wisdom within Indian stories. In this story, “A Drug Called Tradition,” the protean nature of humor itself compels new knowledge about Victor’s relation to the cultures that compete for his loyalty. He

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

97

has “corrected”—to a degree—his own complacency and resistance to his Indian heritage. Interestingly, Alexie finds himself—as a story-teller—in much the same place as Thomas, a connection that James Cox has noted.3 Both offer stories that challenge and disrupt the status quo. Rather than creating a cultural void, however, both force listeners/readers to re-evaluate accepted ways of thinking. Perhaps as a result of their unconventional and confrontational roles, neither gain widespread acceptance within their own communities. Thomas Builds-The-Fire is shunned or abused by most Indians; few want to bother with his stories. Likewise, Alexie is sometimes criticized by others Indians. Erik Himmelsbach writes, While Alexie has enlightened the world at large about the contemporary American Indian experience, his tribe has essentially shunned him. Back at the Spokane Reservation in Wellpinit, Wash., people have strong, often unfavorable opinions about the author who, as a child, often whiled away his days alone in his room playing Dungeons & Dragons or Nerf basketball. “I was a divisive presence on the reservation when I was 7,” he recalls. “I was a weird, eccentric, very arrogant little boy. The writing doesn’t change anybody’s opinion of me. If anything, it’s intensified it.”

This type of reaction reappears within his art. For example, in the film The Business of Fancydancing, Seymour is rejected by his boyhood friends on the reservation, and in Reservation Blues, the band Coyote Springs is reviled in the Spokane press for supposedly being “representative” of the entire tribe (175). Nevertheless, story-telling, like humor, offers the potential for increased understanding. In the film Seymour defends his choices by describing himself as a public relations specialist who attracts attention to issues vital to Indians. Seymour, Alexie, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, and Coyote Springs obligate others to think about problems too often ignored. As Lincoln writes, “Storytelling personally brings people together; it engages them collectively in giving and receiving the events of their lives. In such storytelling times, people occupy space with focused attention; they enter their common world more fully” (Native American Renaissance 223). Alexie’s use of humor, in particular, adds a complex new dynamic to the communal territory allowed by stories. In “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Alexie focuses explicitly on the equivocal place of humor in daily life. In this story more than any other, he demonstrates the power of humor both to bring people together and to tear people apart. The title itself toys with the varying degrees—the approximate

98

Joseph L. Coulombe

size—to which the first-person narrator, Jimmy, makes use of his favorite thing—humor—to deal with his cancer. Both the humor and the tumor are potentially dangerous aspects of Jimmy’s life. While cancer slowly kills him, his jokes about it—particularly his “favorite” tumor that he insists is shaped liked a baseball—drive a wedge between him and his wife, Norma. Jimmy’s preoccupation with the baseball-sized tumor (“even had stitch marks” he says) emphasizes the game-playing that he prefers to hide behind. Jimmy’s humor appears to be an attempt to transform a very real threat to his life into a benign token of a national pastime. The comic treatment is a coping mechanism that borders on denial. He makes light of a serious danger to his life by connecting it to—and reducing it to—a mere game. His humor seems like an effort to hide from the reality of cancer. From this vantage, Jimmy’s joking might reflect the concerns of those critics who feel that Alexie wants to ignore real threats to Indian cultures and identities. Alexie’s humor is sometimes viewed as a screen that belies the inner hurt and anger felt by many Indians and that ultimately does more harm than good. Writing specifically about Alexie, Owens writes, I would argue that self-destructive, self-deprecatory humor provides an essential matrix for this fiction because such humor deflects any “lesson in morality” from the non-Native reader and allows authors to maintain an aggressive posture regarding an essential “authentic” Indianness while simultaneously giving the commercial market and reader exactly what they want and expect in the form of stereotype and cliché: what Vizenor terms the “absolute fake.” (76)

Overlooking Owens’s presumptions about non-Native readers, we might agree that Jimmy does indeed seem to be faking. However, his masquerade fails to fool Norma or, I suspect, many readers (Indian or otherwise). Rather, his humor suggests the extent to which Jimmy will go to try to protect himself from real pain: he does not want to face the horror of his cancer. Who can blame him? Coming to terms with the pain and loneliness of a terminal disease is no easy matter. Nevertheless, watching him undergo various stages of denial does not blind readers to his heartache. Rather, it emphasizes the personal pain that Jimmy is experiencing. His humor may appear selfdestructive on one level, but its effect upon readers is the opposite. It begs the question: what has prompted Jimmy to pretend the pain does not exist? Perhaps one answer is offered by the first story in the collection. “Every Little Hurricane” highlights the larger cultural context that causes characters to drink too much and fight with each other. These personal “storms” result from “a specific, painful memory” of racism for each individual Indian: “Victor’s father remembered the time his own father was spit on as they waited

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

99

for a bus in Spokane. Victor’s mother remembered how the Indian Health Service doctor sterilized her moments after Victor was born” (8). And so on. Alexie is not simply replaying the hackneyed stereotype of “vanishing Americans” who destroy themselves and thus fulfill generic white expectations. Alexie’s stories—as a collection—demand reader recognition of the wider context. His characters are not self-destructive losers; they are sympathetic, complex individuals trying to cope within a racist society. Likewise, understanding Jimmy’s use of humor as a screen for his multilayered pain in “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” requires attention to his formative experiences, which, in turn, prompt a more constructive response to his cancer. In this regard, we might argue that his use of humor in the face of adversity shows real personal strength. In Custer Died For Your Sins, Vine Deloria Jr. writes, “When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that that people can survive” (167). In this light, laughter replaces Jimmy’s fear and demonstrates his ability to survive and even triumph over debilitating circumstances. His jokes make him feel larger than life, allowing him to transcend his daily fight against cancer by magnifying himself into someone famous and beloved by all. For instance, Jimmy confides to his friend, Simon, what he had already said to Norma: I told her to call me Babe Ruth. Or Roger Maris. Maybe even Hank Aaron. . . . I told her I was going to Cooperstown and sit right down in the lobby of the Hall of Fame. Make myself a new exhibit, you know? Pin my X-rays to my chest and point out the tumors. What a dedicated baseball fan! What a sacrifice for the national pastime! (157)

Attempting to rise above his tragic personal situation, he projects himself as a world-famous sports star, acting as if such popularity will allow him to surmount the day-to-day fear and frustration of living with cancer. As Deloria argues, “The more desperate the problem, the more humor is directed to describe it. Satirical remarks often circumscribe problems” (147). To allay his desperation, Jimmy imagines himself in a position of honor at the baseball Hall of Fame—earning gratitude from fans for his apparent selflessness and fanatic commitment to the game—in an effort to limit the extent of his problem and to control it. His humor aims for selfdefinition and personal sovereignty. From yet another perspective, however, this comic attempt at selfaggrandizement works against Jimmy by putting him on display for tourists to gawk at. Readers might regard him as simply fulfilling reductive stereotypes of

100

Joseph L. Coulombe

Indians as cultural curiosities and historical souvenirs for the entertainment of white America. To borrow Owens’s phrase, he has become an unwitting victim of “inner-colonization” (82). However, I believe that Alexie enlists these images to recall to readers the social injustices perpetrated upon Indian peoples. In fact, the connection to the national pastime renders Alexie’s provocative humor all the more poignant, as images of Indians have long been used—from the Boston “tea party” to the Atlanta Braves—by white America to symbolize what is quintessentially American (something Phillip Deloria demonstrates in Playing Indian). Within the context of his joke (and Alexie’s story), Jimmy becomes, in part, a living symbol of a dying people, and his cancer exemplifies and highlights the physical and psychological assault upon Indian cultures by Euro-American society. Moreover, his ability to joke about self-involvement in his own humiliation—and thus about the supposed complicity of Indian people in their exploitation—shows cultural awareness, self-knowledge, and personal strength, even while it reveals an irreverence (shared by Alexie) toward normally sacrosanct topics. The humor of Jimmy’s assertion depends upon our recognition of its absurdity in relation to historical facts—and, more importantly, its sad relevance in the face of cultural misconceptions. As Lincoln writes, “The potshots make both sides think, if disagreeably, then finally dialogically” (Indi’n Humor 25). Alexie’s humor has this effect; it shocks readers into regenerate perspectives via their own discomfort. Because of this, Alexie recognizes the potential danger of his “potshots” and takes pains to illustrate when and how humor can obstruct personal growth and productive relationships. After all, not everyone appreciates Jimmy’s sense of humor. One problem is that he so constantly depends upon games and jokes about his disease that he comes across to others as selfish and myopic. His humor fails to consider the feelings of friends and family. Rather than appreciate his strength and patience, much less his humor, the other characters often react instinctively against him. Even his friend Simon, after listening to his Hall-of-Fame joke, says, “You’re an asshole” (157), and Jimmy can only agree. But he does not do anything to change. Instead, he appears determined to drive away even his closest friends with his unrelenting humor. For example, in the first section of the story, Jimmy and his wife Norma have just finished a verbal fight, and neither seems willing to make up. When Jimmy finally seeks out Norma to resolve their differences, she makes it clear why she’s annoyed, asking: “Are you going to make any more jokes about [your cancer]?” (159), and then adding: “If you say anything funny ever again, I’m going to leave you.” Obviously this is a critical moment, a time for carefully chosen words and feelings. Instead, Jimmy describes to readers what he did: I lost my smile briefly, reached across the table to hold her hand, and said something incredibly funny. It was maybe the best one-

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

101

liner I had ever uttered. Maybe the moment that would have made me a star anywhere else. But in the Powwow Tavern, which was just a front for reality, Norma heard what I had to say, stood up, and left me. (159)

Jimmy lost his wife—whom he loved—because his joke depersonalized a very personal situation. A joke—even from the funniest Indian in the world (and Jimmy is pretty funny)—was guaranteed to destroy his relationship because it denied real intimacy. Humor in this situation erected a barricade between him and his wife. The parallel to Alexie’s position is fairly obvious: he lost the favor of some critics with a brand of humor that “made him a star” rather than garnering respect within the Indian community. By Jimmy’s own account, his joke would have won him fame some place else, a description that reinforces the distance between him and Norma. He imagines himself in an entirely different situation than his reality—fantasizing about a popularity that helps negate personal pain. Jimmy’s wish to be a star mirrors his self-image of celebrity super-fan at the baseball Hall of Fame. Professional athletes and entertainment-industry stars always look good and smile at the camera; they have become national symbols of health and fitness. Jimmy’s desire to be famous—couched in the guise of humor and placed between him and his wife—seems like an attempt to avoid the honesty required within one-to-one personal relationships. His self-indulgent, almost obsessive, use of humor destroys or prevents any real closeness to anyone. Like the Powwow Tavern where he finds Norma, his joking seems like a front for reality, a sad effort to laugh off and ignore what will not go away. Instead, his effort to be funny drives away what he probably needs most: support and friendship. Here, Alexie implicitly acknowledges the danger of Owens’s “frontier,” of Bakhtin’s “zone,” and of his own humor: the possibility of misunderstanding and backlash is real. More explicitly, the short story “Amusements” illustrates not only the fact that humor can separate characters from their friends—and from themselves—but it also demonstrates how Alexie’s comic style can prompt readers’ disgust and anger. In the story, Victor and Sadie play a cruel prank on Dirty Joe (possibly an echo of Mark Twain’s similarly stereotyped character, Injun Joe, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). They put the inebriated man on a roller coaster at a crowded amusement park, and white onlookers respond with horror and delight. Critical response has been largely negative. Owens writes, “[T]he two young people are enacting in miniature precisely what Alexie has done with his work thus far” (80). To Owens, “Amusements” is the best example of how Alexie “simply reinforces all of the stereotypes desired by white readers: his bleakly absurd and aimless Indians are imploding in a passion of self-destructiveness and self-loathing” (79).4 However, Owens focuses upon

102

Joseph L. Coulombe

the act alone, and he overlooks—within the story and the collection—both the causes of their actions and the results. Alexie demonstrates how their illconceived joke stemmed from years (even centuries) of racism. Remembering the “white . . . faces twisted with hate and disgust,” Victor confesses, “I was afraid of all of them, wanted to hide behind my Indian teeth, the quick joke” (55). His thoughtless prank does not occur in a cultural vacuum. Rather, it results from a lifetime of fear and frustration living in a society that too often reduces Indians to one-dimensional stereotypes. Throughout The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Alexie repeatedly emphasizes the personal and historical contexts that help explain the difficult problems facing many Indians today. For example, in the preceding story, “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore,” the narrator states: “[I]t’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It’s the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins” (49). Likewise, in Reservation Blues, which seldom reaches the virtuosity of Lone Ranger and Tonto, Alexie provides the cultural context that affects individual choices. He describes “a woman who grew up without electricity and running water, who grew up in such poverty that other poor Indians called her family poor” (67). In contrast to this, “White people owned everything: food, houses, clothes, children. Television constantly reminded Thomas of all he never owned. For hours, Thomas searched the television for evidence of Indians” (70). Alexie expects readers to interpret his characters’ actions in light of the societal realities that he details. While stories like “Amusements” may present lamentable situations, few readers, I suspect, and this includes my primarily white middle-class students, interpret Alexie’s fiction as other than a harsh indictment of white complicity. Moreover, Victor himself recognizes the problem with his joke within the story. He understands exactly whom he has become, and obviously he does not like it. Hiding in the fun house, he stares at his reflection in the crazy mirrors: “The kind that distort your features, make you fatter, thinner, taller, shorter. The kind that make a white man remember he’s the master of ceremonies barking about the Fat Lady, the Dog-Faced Boy, the Indian who offered up another Indian like some treaty” (58). Victor admits that he has become a circus monstrosity, an aberration without identity or self-respect. The story ends immediately after his realization. Part of what makes Alexie difficult and fascinating is his elusive, even poetic, prose style. He rarely expostulates at length, instead he forces readers to puzzle out the meaning for themselves. Whereas Owens suggests that Alexie “does not perhaps understand what he is doing” (80)—I would argue that Alexie effectively identifies the problem of culturally taught self-hate to readers. Without sermonizing or simplifying, he exposes the years (and centuries) of neglect and prejudice that

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

103

can result in obviously regrettable decisions. In this way, Alexie invites readers onto the dialogic “frontier”: Victor’s revelation at the end of “Amusements” is the beginning of his self-examination and possible growth. Victor senses the need for change, and so should readers. Alexie’s story forces us to rethink our own level of culpability in a culture that fosters racism, hate, and despair. Throughout his fiction, Alexie emphasizes the need for a revaluation of personal morality and social ethics. In addition to his provocative use of humor, Alexie creates characters who showcase individual strength and ability as well as an expansive pan-Indian belief system. Whereas critics like Owens complain that “there is no family or community toward which his characters . . . might turn for coherence” (79), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven contains many positive examples of personal strength and development, even while exploring the disruptions that plague Indian communities. In “The Fun House,” for example, the narrator’s aunt makes a decision to distance herself from her ungrateful family. After a day spent by herself, she returns to the house, dons an exceedingly heavy bead dress, and dances: “She stood, weakly. But she had the strength to take the first step, then another quick one. She heard drums, she heard singing, she danced. Dancing that way, she knew things were beginning to change” (82). The story ends on a distinctly positive note. While the woman draws upon her inner strength to rise above the skewed ethics of her husband and son, the dance and the bead dress connect her to a traditional Indian culture as well as signal the beginning of a new tradition. Her actions show how longstanding traditions can be successfully transformed—sometimes even merged with those of other cultures—to operate effectively within a changing world. As she says of the dress: “It’s just like the sword in the stone” (76). Like King Arthur, who gains the crown by removing the sword, she proves herself a leader by wearing the dress. One of Alexie’s concerns is the blending of cultures and the transmutations that result. His fictional world mirrors the real world. As Joane Nagle outlines in American Indian Ethnic Renewal, local cultures often fuse with the other cultures in order to survive (188). In this regard, Alexie is not far removed from Leslie Marmon Silko, a writer that critics usually contrast to Alexie.5 In Silko’s Ceremony, two spiritual leaders tell Tayo (the central character struggling to define himself ) that he cannot rely entirely upon the traditional ways. Night Swan says, “[M]ost people are afraid of change. . . . They are fools” (100). Likewise, Betonie tells him: “[A]fter the white people came, elements of this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (126). Alexie’s fiction falls squarely within an Indian literary tradition advocating growth and change. For instance, Lincoln describes “Now Day Indi’ns”: “Being Indian, then, may mean

104

Joseph L. Coulombe

adjusting the definition to the tribal reality at hand, rather than living nostalgically in a mythic past” (Native American Renaissance 187). Always writing with a keen historical awareness, Alexie transforms past traditions—whether dancing, drumming, or story-telling—to fit a new world reality. He states plainly that his fiction does not seek to resurrect a bygone heritage, but instead focuses on the truth that he sees in the present.6 The story, “Distances,” demonstrates the possible dangers of traditionalism and tribalism if brought to its logical extreme (as “The Sin Eaters” in The Toughest Indian in the World shows the atrocities of white ethnic extremism). In an interview with Juliette Torrez, he said: I’m not talking about four directions corn pollen mother earth father sky shit. I’m not talking about that stereotypical crap about being Indian. There’s always a huge distance between public persona and private person. In my art I try to keep that as narrow as possible. I try to write about the kind of Indian I am, the kind of person I am and not the kind of person or Indian I wish I was. (Torrez Interview 31 August 1999)

In this vein, his short stories delineate not only the harsh cultural realities facing Indians (both on and off the reservation) but also the pride and strength that sustain them. Alexie no more advocates the wholesale adoption of white culture than he would suggest the irrelevance of past cultural traditions, despite his often positive depictions of change and renewal. In “The Fun House,” for example, he exposes the sometimes grotesque distortions that can result from fused cultures. The female protagonist was angered by misogynist jokes. In an interview, Alexie describes what angered him most about white culture: “Pretty much everything patriarchal. We’ve resisted assimilation in many ways, but I know we’ve assimilated into sexism and misogyny” (McFarland 27). “The Fun House” exposes the flaws within white culture and how those flaws harm Indians and their local culture.7 Likewise, in the copiously titled, “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ At Woodstock,” Alexie not only satirizes the hippies “trying to be Indian” but also explains a negative change within Indian culture, writing: “On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It’s because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That’s how assimilation can work” (34). Whereas Alexie often uses humor to reveal social injustice and immorality, he does not simply blame Indians. White America is the root cause of Indian problems.

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

105

Nonetheless some critics excoriate Alexie for suggesting that Indians themselves have failed. As Owens writes, “[N]o one is really to blame but the Indians, no matter how loudly the author shouts his anger” (80). However, Alexie blames white culture over and over again in no uncertain terms. In “The Fun House,” for example, part of the woman’s bitterness results from a sterilization program enacted by the United States government: “[T]he doctor tied her tubes, with the permission slip my aunt signed because the hospital administrator lied and said it proved her Indian status for the bia” (81). Here Alexie points an accusing finger at a society that has systematically trampled upon the rights of Indian people for over five hundred years. While white America often shakes its head over the sins of the past, few want to acknowledge the illegal and immoral machinations of the present. Likewise, “The Trial of Thomas Builds-The-Fire” also highlights the atrocities perpetrated upon Indians. A courtroom situation allows Thomas the opportunity to recount a series of stories regarding white crimes upon Indians, including lynchings, massacres, and thefts. It ends with Thomas being carted off to jail with “four African men, one Chicano, and a white man from the smallest town in the state” (103). Alexie shows the present-day reality of opportunity and justice in modern day America: the poor—particularly poor people of color—face systemic oppression and inequity. Thomas’s stories in “The Trial” offer the most compelling context to explain how Indians have been kept poor for so long. However, Alexie seems more focused upon showing the importance of community than exposing a culture of neglect, and he provides examples of positive familial connection throughout The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. For example, in “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”—the prototype for the movie Smoke Signals—Victor and Thomas take a pilgrimage to Arizona, and their friendship re-emerges as a result of their shared respect for Victor’s father. Thomas says, “Your dad was my vision. Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying. Take care of each other” (69). Alexie’s message appears obvious: friendship and support are essential to a fulfilling life and a healthy community. In the first three stories in his recent collection, The Toughest Indian in the World, Alexie also explores various efforts by assimilated urban Indians to reconnect to “real” Indians. Rather than insulting Indians and their diverse cultures, he shows in his fiction how personal pain and honesty can bring renewal, change, and solidarity. Alexie’s use of humor is perhaps his most important strategy for demonstrating Indian friendship and connection. Humor offers a bond to individuals otherwise alienated within a hostile culture. In “The Approximate Size of His Favorite Tumor,” Alexie flashes back to Jimmy and Norma’s first meeting, showing how humor brought them together by creating an intimate space separate not only from other Indians, but also from antagonistic

106

Joseph L. Coulombe

white people. Jimmy tells readers how he first met Norma at a reservation bar; both were drinking Diet Pepsi. Because he was laughing so loud, Norma approached his table to join the fun and cracked her own joke. Jimmy explains their response: “And we laughed. Then we laughed harder when [my cousin] Raymond leaned in closer to the table and said, ‘I don’t get it’” (160). Although they laugh harder, in part, because of Raymond’s inability to understand, they also recognize the bond that occurs over a shared joke, especially a private joke. They are the insiders who understand and appreciate the humor, and, naturally, it brings them closer. Their response, however, shows more than two people simply having a good time together, although that is certainly part of it. They are reacting to the ability of humor to create a closed space. A new-found intimacy is allowed by a joke that only they comprehend. Raymond does not “get it,” and so he is left outside of their “zone of contact,” to reiterate Bakhtin’s phrase. In their case, humor functions positively to unite two like-minded people within an environment that otherwise might exclude them. Neither of them drink—except for Diet Pepsi—and they are in a bar. Whereas bar patrons more typically rely upon alcohol to create a sense of community, Jimmy and Norma use their shared sense of humor to create a community of two.8 A similar situation occurs after they are married, only this time humor constructs a protected space for them in a hostile white world. Their joking allows an intellectual and emotional safe zone that shelters them from a destructive society. Alexie records an event in which Jimmy and Norma have a run-in with an institutionalized representative of white America. While driving down a highway, a state patrolmen pulls them over and threatens them with a variety of fabricated charges (a situation that Alexie also explores in “Traveling” from the collection The Business of Fancydancing). Soon enough the cop offers “some kind of arrangement so none of this has to go on your record” (165), an arrangement that turns out to be precisely the amount of money Jimmy and Norma have in their pockets. Rather than responding to this racist and illegal shakedown with open anger or frustration, they use humor as a defense. When the officer tells them about a “new law against riding as a passenger in an Indian car,” Jimmy says, “[w]e’ve known about that one for a couple hundred years” (165). After giving up all his money, he adds: “Your service has been excellent” (166), a sarcastic jibe that forces a laugh from Norma. No longer able to resist, she also “jumped into the fun,” as Jimmy puts it. When the officer threatens them with more serious charges, she facetiously tells him: “I’ll just tell everyone how respectful you were of our Native traditions, how much you understood about the social conditions that lead to the criminal acts of so many Indians. I’ll say you were sympathetic, concerned, and intelligent” (166). Their humor helps to diffuse their anger and fear. It shows strength and intelligence in the face of adversity, while it also

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

107

shields Jimmy and Norma from a common threat. Not allowing themselves to be bullied—as the driver does in “Traveling”—they instead use humor to take control of the situation. Jimmy explains to readers: “[Y]ou have to realize that laughter saved Norma and me from pain, too. Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds” (164). Their joking provides a relatively secure psychological space for them to share together—a space that defies a world filled with hatred and prejudice. For both of them, as for many of Alexie’s Indian characters, the “deepest of personal wounds” is the lack of recognition—on the part of white society—of their basic human rights and their human dignity. Whereas ethnic bias can tear people apart, humor allows them to identify with each other more firmly by creating a common space—a zone of contact—that rejects the outside threat. Despite his often light-hearted tone, Alexie writes with a firm social and moral purpose: he wants all readers—Indian and nonIndian—to recognize the possibility of this common space, to understand and appreciate their shared humanity. In an interview, Alexie defines how he arrived at this conviction: I think there are three stages of Indian-ness: The first stage is where you feel inferior because you’re Indian, and most people never leave it. The next stage is feeling superior because you’re Indian and a small percentage of people get into that and most never leave it. At the end, they get on realizing that Indians are just as fucked up as everybody else. No better no worse. I try to be in that stage. (Torrez Interview 31 August 1999)

Most of Alexie’s characters deal with a variety of problems; they are typically complex and multidimensional. As he puts it, they are “as fucked up as everybody else.” In other words, they are the same as his readers, the same as anyone. Their particular challenges, however, often result from racial prejudice and social disadvantage. In his stories, Alexie exposes a nation that many Americans might not want to acknowledge or deal with. He writes about the lack of options open to Indians—both on the reservation and off. He exposes the extreme poverty, the alcohol and drug abuse, the broken families, the isolation. This is not cheerful stuff; in fact, it is a national disgrace—the inevitable result of centuries of abuse and neglect. Alexie shrewdly presents this sociopolitical reality with humor to soften its initial impact. Ron McFarland states that humor “makes the pain and anger bearable for the reader” (31). Alexie himself said in an interview: “You make people laugh and you disarm them. You sort of sneak up on them. You can say controversial or rowdy things and they’ll listen or laugh” (Torrez Interview 31 August 1999). He uses humor to draw readers in and entertain

108

Joseph L. Coulombe

them; once he has them, he communicates his world view, one that does not necessarily reflect the comforting, traditional American ideals of equal opportunity and democratic justice for all. More important than Alexie’s use of humor to advance possibly controversial ideas, however, is his understanding of the potential for humor to link different sorts of people together despite ethnic, racial, and cultural boundaries. Vine Deloria Jr. writes: “People have little sympathy with stolid groups. Dick George did much more than is believed when he introduced humor into the Civil Rights struggle. He enabled non-blacks to enter into the thought world of the black community and experience the hurt it suffered” (146). Alexie understands this fully. Since his Indian characters find a sense of community in humor, humor also allows bonds between Indians and whites. In “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” for example, Jimmy is back in his doctor’s office for more radiation treatment three months after Norma left him. He and Dr. Adams seem to inhabit entirely different worlds, but their joking lessens the distance between them. Jimmy again plays with visions of fame and power, saying: “A few more zaps and I’ll be Superman.” And she replies: “Really? I never realized Clark Kent was a Spokane Indian” (162). Jimmy then writes, “And we laughed, you know, because sometimes that’s all two people have in common” (162). Although their laughter has a sad, hollow element, it nevertheless offers some sense of connection. It lessens the distance between them and humanizes a clinical, potentially sterile, situation. After another joke, Jimmy writes, “And we laughed, you know, because sometimes you’d rather cry” (162). Again, the laughter provides relief from the realities of cancer treatment by allowing them to share something deeply human, something life-affirming. Humor forces their differences to the sidelines and permits them to connect in a positive manner. Jimmy clearly appreciates his alliance (however temporary) to the doctor. As she prepares to leave, he “wanted to call her back and make an urgent confession, to ask forgiveness, to offer truth in return for salvation” (163). When he calls out her name and she asks him what he wants he only says, “Nothing. Just wanted to hear your name. It sounds like drums to these heavily medicated Indian ears of mine” (163). His response expresses a cross-cultural compliment that includes Dr. Adams in the Indian world. Her name is like drums, a traditional part of many Indian cultures. Whereas humor offers solidarity and protection to Jimmy and Norma in the face of white police aggression, humor allows Jimmy to bond with his doctor and gain temporary respite from his loneliness and fear. Their connection fosters a sense of community that can be shared by all people regardless of background. Although Indian/white relations in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven are usually fraught with racial tension, Alexie offers occasional glimpses of sympathy, friendship, and love. These instances tend to

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

109

re-emphasize the hope for mutual understanding and attachment. In the title story, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” for example, the bored narrator amuses himself by silently provoking a convenience store clerk working the graveyard shift. In spite of his antagonistic attitude toward the clerk, the narrator admits his sympathy for and identification with him, saying: “There was something about him I liked, even if it was three in the morning and he was white” (184). Whereas their racial differences first prompt separation, they eventually connect using humor. The narrator launches a couple Brady Bunch jokes to break the ice, jokes that are slightly insulting to the white guy, but serve to highlight a shared sense of humor: both appreciate ironic self-deprecation in the face of a perceived threat (a tactic that Alexie uses throughout the collection). As Lincoln writes, “In addition to survival and renewal, a comic vision can be amicably competitive, even pleasurably engaging. . . . [It] targets issues with an attention that roughs its audience affectionately, Indian-to-white” (Indi’n Humor 25–26). Both young men are poor, disenfranchised outsiders who take dangerous jobs that few others want. They recognize their status (or lack of status) and resort to humor as a chance to transcend their meager positions. Their jokes offer them a brief connection that rejects the unfair world of moneyed hierarchies. Momentarily, they are not a white guy and an Indian guy; instead, they are both underpaid workers in low-level jobs. Their shared laughter repudiates the culture that hands them peanuts. Before the narrator leaves, the clerk gives him a free Creamsicle because “those little demonstrations of power tickled him” (184). Not quite friends, but extending friendly gestures, both characters take pains to show that they live on their own terms and not those dictated by society. Their moderately rebellious stances—and their use of humor—bring them together in an ethical stance at odds with mainstream society. Likewise, in the final story of the collection, “Witnesses, Secret and Not,” the young Indian narrator, his father, and a white detective discover that they can join together in laughter. They are discussing, again, the father’s friend who disappeared several years earlier and is presumed murdered. The rehashed interview involves an implied hostility, tempered only by the apparent routine of the situation, until the narrator begins to laugh about the childish way that the detective writes (with his tongue poking out of his mouth). He tells readers: “I shook my head and laughed harder. Soon all three of us were laughing, at mostly nothing. Maybe we were all nervous or bored. Or both” (221). Their laughter not only breaks the tension, it offers them a chance to bond together in some vague way. For a moment they can forget the grim detective business at hand. Perhaps they can even forget about the implicit harassment of a white detective repeatedly interviewing an Indian man about a murder. Their shared laughter suggests a desire to unite over something

110

Joseph L. Coulombe

untainted by racial bias. Humor allows them to transcend the situation temporarily, to forget their roles as detective/white and suspect/Indian, and instead to connect in a wholly humane manner over something as innocent and playful as a child’s private joke. Many of Alexie’s short stories serve the same end. In fact, Alexie himself has stated that many of his jokes are private: “I load my books with stuff, just load ’em up. I call them ‘Indian trapdoors.’ You know, Indians fall in, white people just walk right over them. . . . I really want the subtext for Indians” (Purdy Interview 15). If Alexie creates a subtext of humor that brings Indians together, he offers enough clever jokes, ironic witticisms, and absurdist rejoinders to engage and include white readers as well. He repeatedly employs humor to forge a bond between Indians and whites, between himself and his diverse readers. Humor acts as a transcendent force. When we laugh, we join together in a largely affirmative, entirely human response to an often unfair world. It creates a shared, protected space that invites everyone’s participation. Laughter is the great unifier, and it has the power to lift us—if only temporarily—beyond many racial tensions and cultural conflicts. In Reservation Blues, Father Arnold understands this connection: “He was impressed by the Spokanes’ ability to laugh. He’d never thought of Indians as being funny. . . . Father Arnold learned to laugh at everything, which strangely made him feel closer to God” (36). Humor is a part of Indian culture—and Alexie’s fiction— not as a sign of his supposedly hip irreverence but instead because it offers respite from worldly pain. Humor permits escape to an enlightened zone in which people can appreciate their similarities rather than focus on their differences. Perhaps for this reason Alexie’s title has the Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfighting in heaven. The comic divination of two fictional creations boxing competitively not only recalls Lincoln’s description of humor as pleasingly provocative, but it also elicits laughter that might, like Father Arnold, make readers “feel closer to God.” Both the fight and the humor constitute “heavenly” activities that aspire to equalize readers in a transcendent humanism. Likewise, the final line of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven—“All of us” (223)—emphasizes human unity over ethnic division. At the end of “Witnesses, Secret or Not,” as the narrator’s father cries over his disappeared friend, Alexie identifies everyone as a witness to his tears: “All of us” includes not only the characters and perhaps the dead friend himself, but also the readers who have observed the suffering, heartache, love, and joy of Indian life as presented by Alexie throughout the collection. As readers, we have witnessed varied glimpses of Indian lives and world views, and, as a result, we are culpable for injustices and misconceptions. Alexie uses his collection of short stories to change the way people think. As Craig Womack writes, “Native artistry is not pure aesthetics, or art for art’s sake: as often as not Indian writers are trying to invoke as much as evoke” (16–17).

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

111

To this end Alexie takes pains to educate readers regarding Indian perspectives. He repeatedly reveals the causes and diverse effects—both historic and contemporary—of Indian anger and frustration with white America. Over and over again he warns of the potentially violent reactions to cultural indifference.9 One example, in “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation,” has the narrator imagining the angry rebellion of his adopted son: “He’s going to dynamite Mount Rushmore or hijack a plane and make it land on the reservation highway” (120). Such images disallow readers from feigning ignorance. Pretending to believe in a supposedly innocent America (a strangely recurring trend over the past two-plus centuries) is impossible. Alexie makes clear that America was never innocent, something any person familiar with white/Indian relations has long known. His novel, Indian Killer, stands as a testament to the rage and aggression seething within individuals split between sets of incompatible cultural expectations. In some respects Alexie’s fiction is a call to arms—or, perhaps, an arming of the intellect. Reviewing James Welch’s Killing Custer, Alexie wrote that “the war between Indians and whites has never ended” (Richardson 46). Likewise, in “Imagining the Reservation” he begins with a request: “Imagine Crazy Horse invented the atom bomb in 1876 and detonated it over Washington D.C. . . . Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean” (149). Alexie understands that wars are fought largely within the imaginations of the populace. Those who win the battle of popular opinion are more likely to succeed. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is part of Alexie’s ongoing war against complacency and ignorance. Ultimately, it forces readers into a position comparable to Victor in “A Drug Called Tradition” (discussed at the beginning of this essay). Laughter might discomfort and confuse us, but it also prompts rethinking, growth, and change. As a result, an essential part of Alexie’s battle is his boisterous affirmation of Indian life, a facet of his fiction too often ignored by critics. He repeatedly enumerates the hopefulness, creativity, humor, pleasure, and strength of Indians. His characters are neither consumed by rage nor obsessed with revenge. Rather, they are often delighted with each other and pleased with the details of their lives. In “The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue,” Alexie uses a recurring refrain—”there is something beautiful about”—to introduce positive elements of reservation life: the “beautiful dissonance and implied survival” of Victor’s piano playing; the braided boy who wins the wrestling match; the man who prevailed in the story-telling contest as well as the basketball tournament; and particularly the dreams “crackling like a campfire . . . [and] laughing in the sawdust” (148). These positive images provide a necessary balance to the sometimes harsh images of Indian life. They are poetic, spare, elusive, even cinematic. Alexie is at his best when

112

Joseph L. Coulombe

writing in this vein, which is probably why his novels have received more negative criticism (especially Reservation Blues) than his poems and short stories. Moreover, the life-affirming images are as realistic as the negative representations. Like anywhere, good and bad—success and failure—exist together. Alexie makes clear that Indian communities are really not much different than others, and any attempts to distinguish too finely are ultimately counterproductive.10 The final image of “The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue” reinforces the idea that Indians and whites are linked equally: “she held the child born of white mother and red father and said, ‘Both sides of this baby are beautiful’” (148). In “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” Alexie also ends on a relatively positive note by reuniting Jimmy with Norma via humor and love. When Norma returns to Jimmy, she enters the (childless) house with the classic joke of the unconventional pretending they fit the Ozzie-and-Harriet, Leave-It-to-Beaver convention: “Honey, I’m home. . . . Where are the kids?” After momentary surprise, Jimmy extends the joke, saying: “They’re asleep. Poor little guys tried to stay awake, you know?” (169). The humor breaks the ice and lets them reconnect and then proceed to more serious matters. In fact, Norma admits that humor is one of the reasons why she left another man to come back to Jimmy, saying: “he was so fucking serious about everything” (170). The second reason for her return is more grave but just as significant as her need for laughter; she says: “someone needs to help you die the right way” (170). Thus, it seems, the two things that bring them together are humor and death. Both equalize and unify; both prompt common fears and frustrations. Of course, both also threaten separation. Lincoln writes, “Like the redness of blood, or jokes about failure, dying remains a universal for all humans (the last joke?)” (Indi’n Humor 27). Jimmy and Norma use humor as an antiseptic for their wounds, for their pain, for their anxiety about dying. The inevitability of death—and its transcendence—compels them to forget their differences and brings them back together. Death also reminds them of the importance of humor, which offers relief from the pain and loneliness of life. Such shared human dilemmas cause Indians, as Alexie put it, to be “just as fucked up as everybody else. No better no worse.” Norma and Jimmy end up together because they need each other, just as all people need others. Their humor shows that they also genuinely enjoy each other, which is what, I believe, Alexie hopes his readers (and critics) will learn to better appreciate. The emphasis on humor forces readers to appreciate our common humanity; it compels us to rethink our usual answers. Ultimately, Alexie asks: “Do you believe laughter can save us?” (152). The question is a serious one. Despite its potential dangers, humor creates an intimate space that includes everyone who is willing to recognize our similarities and laugh at our

The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor

113

anxieties. Whereas humor can provide a defense in a divisive world, it also offers the opportunity to surmount the false distinctions that separate people and to reinforce the connections that demonstrate our unity and equality.

No t e s ╇ 1. I use the term “Indian”—rather than American Indian or Native American—in deference to Alexie’s preferred term. ╇ 2. Stephen Evans also notes: “[W]hat may be taken as repetitiveness in a casual read-through of Alexie’s work actually reveals ongoing development that is entirely consistent with oral tradition techniques” (48). ╇ 3. James Cox writes: “Thomas Builds-the-Fire, like Alexie, is a story-teller who subverts the image of Tonto constructed by the dominant culture” (60–61). ╇ 4. Stephen Evans writes: “Victor counters his own impulses: Alexie’s satiric mirror turns back on his readers a searing view of Indian self-victimization and shame, an ‘inside’ agent for the defeat of Indians by white civilization through alcohol and humiliation—engaging in what Owens calls ‘inner-colonization’” (61). ╇ 5. Janine Richardson offers a rare exception and considers Alexie a magical realist influenced by Gerald Vizenor and Leslie Marmon Silko (49). ╇ 6. In an interview with John Purdy, Alexie said: “Most of our Indian literature is written by people whose lives are nothing like the Indians they’re writing about. . . . Momaday—he’s not a traditional man. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m not either, but this adherence to the expected idea, the bear and all this imagery. I think it is dangerous, and detrimental” (8). ╇ 7. Alexie makes a similar statement about homophobia in “Somebody Kept Saying Powwow”: “Years ago, homosexuals were given special status within the tribe. They had powerful medicine. I think it’s even more true today, even though our tribe has assimilated into homophobia. I mean, a person has to have magic to assert their identity without regard to all the bullshit, right?” (203). ╇ 8. See Stephen Evans’s article “‘Open Containers’: Sherman Alexie’s Drunken Indians” for an extended discussion of alcohol and alcoholism in Alexie’s writings. ╇ 9. Ron McFarland writes that Alexie’s humor is laced with a hard message: “Especially for non-Indians, it can get rather uncomfortable” (31). 10. For this reason some criticism of Alexie seems too general. For example, Jane Hafen writes, “While gritty realities of Alexie’s reservation life may serve as an outlet for white liberal guilt, they are all too familiar to me” (76). Countering this tendency Janine Richardson writes, “On the surface, Alexie’s novel is a tale of twentieth-century American Indians trying to find their way into adulthood, as all post-adolescents must. They hang out with friends, drink, and kill time as their equally deprived counterparts do in other dead-end, small town locales” (40).

Wor k s Ci t e d Alexie, Sherman. The Business of Fancydancing. Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 1992. ——— . Indian Killer. New York: Warner Books, 1998. ——— . “Interview: Juliette Torrez Goes Long Distance with Sherman Alexie.”(Sic) Vice & Verse (31 August 1999): http://www.fallsapart.com.

114

Joseph L. Coulombe

——— . The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. ——— . Reservation Blues. New York: Warner Books, 1996. Bird, Gloria. “The Exaggeration of Despair in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues.” Wicazo Sa Review (fall 1995): 47–52. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story.” In Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah, 111–138. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Cox, James. “Muting White Noise: The Subversion of Popular Culture Narratives of Conquest in Sherman Alexie’s Fiction.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (winter 1997): 52–70. Deloria, Phillip. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died For Your Sins. London: Macmillan Co., 1969. Evans, Stephen F. “‘Open Containers’: Sherman Alexie’s Drunken Indians.” American Indian Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2001): 46–72. Hafen, P. Jane. “Rock and Roll, Redskins, and Blues in Sherman Alexie’s Work.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (winter 1997): 71–78. Himmelsbach, Erik. “The Reluctant Spokesman.” Los Angeles Times (17 December 96): http:// www.fallsapart.com/art-lat.html. Lincoln, Kenneth. Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ——— . Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. McFarland, Ron. “Sherman Alexie’s Polemical Stories.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (winter 1997): 27–38. Nagle, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Purdy, John. “Crossroads: An Interview with Sherman Alexie.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (winter 1997): 1–18. Richardson, Janine. “Magic and Memory in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (winter 1997): 37–51. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977. Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

A . M . R egier

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing, Transatlantic Travel, and Modernist Arson in Gardens in the Dunes She longed for that freedom, for a fancy dance or, better yet, a Ghost Dance, the necessary violence that would inflame the stars. —Louis Owens, Bone Game The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine is that the time will come when the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery. On this foundation each tribe has built a structure from its own mythology. . . . Some apostles have even thought that all race distinctions are to be obliterated, and that the whites are to participate with the Indians in the coming felicity; but it seems unquestionable that this is equally contrary to the doctrine as originally preached. —James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee

H

ints of the Ghost Dance in a variety of contemporary Native American novels suggest that written narrative may function now as a ghost of the Ghost Dance, carrying out the oral tradition’s revolutionary work in latterday, performative forms that are magically real enough to be powerful. In the epigraph from Bone Game, Abby, a second-generation mixed blood, cites Ghost Dance history as a source for her desire to find forms of freedom, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 51, Number 1 (Spring 2005): pp. 134–157. Copyright © 2005 Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

115

116

A. M. Regier

imagined as revolutionary environmental and cultural change, although the larger plot eventually rejects “necessary violence” as an Anglo misresurrection of the past idiom (100). Similarly, “lost ghost dance songs” are cited as one of the oral sources for Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club in a lyrical ending lament (388). One significant marker of Erdrich’s narratives has been her ongoing attention to the ways in which narrative can work performatively in reference to the history of oral discourse, most clearly by developing a community of first-person speaking voices as in her previous novels. In The Master Butchers Singing Club, the singing of German immigrants and women from a variety of cultural standpoints, while crossing and recrossing national and familial borders during and after the world wars of the early twentieth century, enacts the intertribal gathering of the Ghost Dance movement. The novel’s ending citation of ghost dance discourse allows readers to understand the shifting narrative point of view as performing the intertribal gathering, as it slips among multiple characters’ experiences and traces the mixtures of familial and communal formations across communities undergoing radical border changes. Throughout, no one character emerges as the protagonist or focal point of the narration, but the last chapter offers a kind of communal authorial energy to the previously marginal character nicknamed by her community “Step and a Half.” Named for her long insomniac stride during her trips around her rural community to gather fabric scraps and other objects set out as trash, Step and a Half develops a thrift shop economy out of recycling. She has never revealed to her community whom she has birthed or whom she has found in her night explorations, but readers are offered a final revelation. As in Love Medicine, the ending thus offers a story of origins and identity in a revelation of ancestry; as in many of Erdrich’s previous works, the revelation functions more as a familial trace than a foundation, with a strong emphasis in the hybrid process of cross-cultural identity formations. The legacy of Step and a Half is the mode of recycling narrative discourses as the material scraps of history, the reformations of communal knowledge and revelatory songs, whose steps echo a ghost dance of oral discourse.1 The Master Butchers Singing Club, as well as Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Susan Power’s Grass Dancer, map a range of events in the Dakotas associated with the history of the Ghost Dance movement, an apocalyptic, intertribal, late-nineteenth-century movement treating oral language as part of the action in environmental and cultural regeneration. Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1999 novel, Gardens in the Dunes inhabits the Ghost Dance movement in the American Southwest and connects it to a larger geography of transatlantic, transcultural encounters. Multiple plots in Gardens in the Dunes map intertribal participation in the Ghost Dance movement, the ongoing, forced displacements of Native American populations, the encamp-

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

117

ments of labor populations for industrial projects in the Southwest, transÂ� atlantic movements associated with the rapidly globalizing botanical trade, and three women’s personal travel narratives as concomitant narratives of female subjectivity undergoing change. One result is that Native American, female communal identities are shown to be deeply hybrid formations. Another result is that Anglo-European identity structures are also shown to be deeply, internally hybrid. As a text translating a narrative time and space characterized by many kinds of travel, Gardens in the Dunes puts into motion increasingly hybrid sequences of transnational plots, narrative forms, and admixtures of environmental and archeological objects. The resulting narrative syncretism enacts a narrative politics that could be described variously as “post-nationalist” (Rowe 78) or as ideologically “hybrid” (Bhabha 1). Their narrative politics share a call for discourses not fully defined by any singular national identity. Bhabha keys hybridity to the service of “transnational and translational sense[s] of imagined communities” (1). Finding hybrid and postnationalist narrative structures in Silko’s work, Arturo Aldama suggests that Silko’s earlier body of work is characterized by a tendency to “hybridize and subvert diverse ‘writing practices’ and (re)claim enunciatory spaces” (76). In this essay, I want to explore how Aldama’s conception of claiming and reclaiming “enunciatory spaces” offers a significant approach to Gardens in the Dunes. While many commentators note the surprise turn toward an apparently non-Native nineteenthcentury classic novel structure, Silko’s reclamation of some of the enunciatory spaces of the Ghost Dance movement might suggest that this novel structure itself may work as a hybrid narrative bundle continuing the functions of the ritual songs, orature, and other visionary modes associated with the Ghost Dance movement. The novel functions as a literary compendium of multiple, changing discourses of the Ghost Dance movement, then and now dedicated to social and environmental change. As Silko rewrites multiple contributing genres, the enunciations can be heard as an adaptation of the oral history of Native American literature into the contemporary novel. The potential significance of enunciatory spaces as a reclamatory Native American approach to narrative seems particularly interesting and subversive in the inclusion of non-Native discourses.2 Gardens in the Dunes reclaims some of the enunciatory spaces of the Ghost Dance movement with three forms of discourse. In the first, Silko’s text offers an embedded rewriting of James Mooney’s nineteenth-century anthropological account of the prophet-figure Wovoka.3 In this embedded text, the binary polarization of the terms of ethnographic identity is strongly revised, along with a recasting of the narrative of Wovoka into a future-directed story of ongoing revolution, in contrast to the anthropological fiction of intellectual capture of the figure of revolutionary prophecy. Second, the novel shows the

118

A. M. Regier

Ghost Dance movement as a discursive space producing transformative rather than nativistic forms of Native American literature. A third discourse reclaims the Ghost Dance’s revolutionary expressive terms in relation to women’s traveling cultures. Silko reclaims the revolution and remaps it as a historical hinge to the next stage of literary, gender, and culture politics: the revolution of ghost dance discourse becomes part of the historical fuel feeding the inflamed imaginings of gender and culture revolution in American literary modernism. Ghost Writing: Novelistic Revision of Ethnographic Fictions James Mooney, proposing a study of the Ghost Dance religion to the Bureau of Ethnology for the Smithsonian late in 1891, set out explicitly to demystify “the messiah” Wovoka by finding him and documenting “his own story as told by himself,” in contrast to newspaper accounts about a mysterious, mythical figure (766). His larger project was to investigate the nature of the Ghost Dance religion as a widespread movement among multiple tribes across the Great Plains and the Southwest. The massacre at Wounded Knee had already occurred in 1890, and Mooney seems to position his ethnographic report as a counterargument to interpretations of the Ghost Dance religion stressing violence. In contrast to the primary governmental suspicion of threatening violence inherent in all intertribal gatherings, Mooney argued for the importance of understanding the Ghost Dance phenomenon through “ethnological” methodology: the task was to understand tribal “systems of ethics” as shown by patterns of meanings in the mythological and ritual “observances” of the dance movements and verbal discourses (782). After visits to twenty tribes, participating in multiple versions of the dance, and spending a total of twenty-two months in four field investigations, Mooney came to see the Ghost Dance religion as “revolutionary” but in a sense diametrically opposed to revolutionary violence: “Only those who have known the deadly hatred that once animated the Ute, Cheyenne, and Pawnee, one toward another, and are able to contrast it with their present spirit of mutual brotherly love, can know what the Ghost-dance religion has accomplished in bringing the savage into civilization. It is such a revolution as comes but once in the life of a race” (783). There is much to comment upon in this passage, but first it is necessary to begin with the particulars leading to this passage. Mooney left Washington in December 1891, one year after the massacre at Wounded Knee, briefly visiting the Omaha and Winnebago in Nebraska, then the Sioux at Pine Ridge, then Walker Lake reservation in Nevada to talk with Paiutes and research the Paiute Ghost Dance songs and ceremonial dance elements. Mooney offers a narrative structured by repetitions of finding Wovoka. He translates the name as “Cutter” from the Paiute verb “to cut” (765), emphasizing the identity of the prophet as a craftsman. He documents that Wovoka used

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

119

the English language name Jack Walker when working for Anglo ranchers. Mooney reports finding Wovoka/Walker on New Year’s Day of 1892 in the Mason valley settlement, thirty-two miles north of the Walker Lake reservation. Mooney’s first sighting and subsequent conversation occur after seeing Wovoka/Walker out hunting jack rabbits (768). After an initial conversation, Wovoka/Walker agrees to meet him that night in a lodge during an unusual snow storm, which requires another narrated episode of travel, searching, and finding the man, who is revealed repeatedly to have a tangible, limited, gendered, particularized identity. Mooney reports that the Paiute lifestyle he observed showed signs of both assimilation and resistance. Paiutes wore ranching clothing, but used no utensils or home furnishings belonging to Anglo culture: he records that the Paiutes “subsist on seeds, piñon nuts, and small game, lying down at night on the dusty ground in their cramped wikiups, destitute of even the most ordinary conveniences in use among other tribes. It is a curious instance of a people accepting the inevitable while yet resisting innovation” (770). Mooney then documents Wovoka’s story of his prophetic vision at age twenty: After showing him all, God told him he must go back and tell his people they must be good and love one another, have no quarreling, and live in peace with the whites; that they must work, and not lie or steal; that they must put away all the old practices that savored of war; that if they faithfully obeyed his instructions they would at last be reunited with their friends in this other world, where there would be no more death or sickness or old age. He was then given the dance which he was commanded to bring back to his people (772).

Having expected a claim of drastic, violent millenarian renewal to come, Mooney’s interview then ends with a comparatively anticlimactic ending claim that God gave Wovoka power over the weather (772). Mooney’s interview, as he reports it, drives toward a revelation of peace with and assimilation into Anglo culture, although Mooney recognizes that he may not be receiving an accurate message: “I knew that he was holding something in reserve, as no Indian would unbosom himself on religious matters to a white man with whom he had not had a long and intimate acquaintance” (773): He disclaimed all responsibility for the ghost shirt which formed so important a part of the dance costume among the Sioux; said that there were no trances in the dance as performed among his people—a statement confirmed by eye-witnesses among the neighboring ranchmen—and earnestly repudiated any idea of

120

A. M. Regier

hostility toward the whites, asserting that his religion was one of universal peace. When questioned directly, he said he believed it was better for the Indians to follow the white man’s road and to adopt the habits of civilization (Mooney 772).

After acknowledging counterarguments and probing further, Mooney’s demystification of Wovoka from an intangible mythic presence to an unthreatening ranch worker with a vision of peace and assimilation functions as the stabilizing ground of meaning for the larger ethnographic study. Mooney’s next chapter, “The Doctrine of the Ghost Dance,” opens with an epigraph from the interview with Wovoka emphasizing nonviolence as Mooney’s selection of the central theme of the doctrine: “You must not fight. Do no harm to anyone. Do right always” (777). In the center of the chapter he then develops the claim that the prohibition of war represents a significant shift in the history of tribal identity. To return to the passage cited earlier, Mooney defines tribal life as previously organized around intertribal warfare, in terms of symbols, actions, and relationships, and explicitly differentiates “savage” and “civilized” terms based upon the development of a religion of “brotherly love”: Only those who have known the deadly hatred that once animated Ute, Cheyenne, and Pawnee, one toward another, and are able to contrast it with their present spirit of mutual brotherly love, can know what the Ghost-dance religion has accomplished in bringing the savage into civilization. . . . In conclusion, we may say of the prophet and his doctrine what has been said of one of his apostles by a careful and competent investigator: “He has given these people a better religion than they ever had before, taught them precepts which, if faithfully carried out, will bring them into better accord with their white neighbors, and has prepared the way for their final Christianization.” (783)

Mooney’s ethnography here dramatically demonstrates, as its logical apparatus, the basic binary opposition of the terms “savage” and “civilization” that is deeply present in a larger historical problem identified by Aldama in Disrupting Savagism: “In light of the legacy of the savage/civilized discourse, what then is the practice of the humanities? Are humanities a way to civilize the savage? How deep do colonialist tropes lie in the practice of academic discourse?” (11). Silko’s novel asks the same set of questions by referencing one such history of colonial troping of a binary logic in her ghost writing of Mooney’s anthropology of Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka. To write from the same enunciatory space of ethnography but offer a less binary logic presents

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

121

an important, latter-day disruption of the colonial tropes. Silko’s conception of Wovoka offers a culturally syncretistic rather than binary version of a messiah figure and reverses the direction of assimilation: Gardens in the Dunes emphasizes the syncretism of the multiple tribes and connections with Anglos documented by Mooney and shows therein a pull toward the mix presented as an indigenous directionality in its syncretism. Silko suggests in an interview that European immigrants into the Americas quickly witnessed the assimilation of European Christianity into indigenous forms, as a kind of revolution deeply part of the soil and spirit of the Americas context: “They weren’t here long, and they had to see their Jesus, their Mary, their Joseph, their saints, go native, just like that. And they couldn’t stop it” (Silko, “Listening” 187). Mooney refers to Wovoka as “the messiah,” as though Wovoka takes on a Christianized sense of his identity when Mooney discusses his later accounts of Wovoka with other tribes, even though he has noted that Wovoka himself said that he was not the messiah, but rather a recipient of a revelation (773).4 In one comparative section, Mooney argues that the Puget Sound Shakers were one significant, traceable source for Wovoka’s invention of the Ghost Dance. He reprints documentation from the 1890s on hybridity among Christian and indigenous religious systems in various tribes in western Washington who developed Shaker churches with a mixture of “paraphernalia of the Catholic, Presbyterian, and even some of the Indian religion” ( James Wickersham, qtd. in Mooney 755). However, in later discussions, Mooney both flirts with and resists implicating broader American Christianity in his own binary scheme of “primitive” and “civilized” peoples: “As to the dance itself, with its scenes of intense excitement, spasmodic action, and physical exhaustion even to unconsciousness, such manifestations have always accompanied religious upheavals among primitive peoples, and are not entirely unknown among ourselves. In a country which produces magnetic healers, shakers, trance mediums, and the like, all these things may very easily be paralleled without going far from home” (783). Silko’s narrative more clearly develops a complex, intertribal, hybrid affiliation of Christian and tribal religious systems: the more clearly syncretistic mix resists the binary ethnographic classification logic of Mooney, although passages such as the above show occasional openings for syncretism. Gardens in the Dunes speaks from the enunciatory spaces of the discursive history of the Paiute prophet Wovoka as a historical source for ongoing Native American story production, with irreducibly cross-cultural mixing as part of its originary textual nature, as well as environmental revolution as part of its apocalyptic prophecy. By mixing biblical and tribal images in Wovoka’s prophecies, Christian narrative is appropriated into a larger, aboriginal structure of story and dream. These mixtures are richly indexed in Silko’s text, including the rais-

122

A. M. Regier

ing of dead ancestors in a tribal ancestor-religion framework, as an originally tribal image available in the biblical image as Ezekiel’s dry bones (361). A mix of Christian resurrection and aboriginal environmentalism exists in an expanded sense in the Ghost Dance vision of resurrection of bison and the ecosystem itself.5 Sam Gill and others note that the Ghost Dance phenomenon clearly responded to cultural encounter, appropriation of lands, and as Gardens in the Dunes graphically emphasizes, human dislocation and land devastation resulting from the new industrialization of the Southwest in the service of delivering water to the new metropolis in the desert, Los Angeles. The novel recounts the millenarian response to these large-scale impacts as found in the prophetic texts and the poetry of the movement: the young child Indigo learns during her first Ghost Dance in the novel that the pattern of movement in the dance is a connective movement, involving a dragging contact with the earth following the directionality of the sun’s movement. Enacting movement as the principle of life, enacting the contact between spirit and earth that could reunite the dead and living, could also empower a tired, invaded environment to wish to live again, Indigo is told (28). The dancing then raises a purifying wind, and the novel presents the ritual orature as effectively performative as dance, participated in by humans, earth, and rocks: “‘Rock dust rings,’ they sang. The whirlwind would transform the Earth, the Paiute woman said. When the wind scoured away all impurities, then the earth’s rebirth would follow” (32). Andrew Wiget has described the “transformative ritual poetry” produced as part of the Ghost Dance movement as “nativistic” insofar as it tends to enact “a call to return to the ancient native ways that existed prior to subjugation” (41). However, he argues for a view of this literature as more “transformative” than nativistic in its call for cataclysmic change, including social change. Wiget documents a Sioux song expressing an “increasing urgency of the messianic apocalyptic vision that foretold a whirlwind and an upheaval of the earth.” Yet Wiget notes that Ghost Dance songs tended to be shared intertribally and “did not function as marks of individual identity” (42). Both the transformative and intertribal character of the ghost dance discourse is emphasized in Gardens in the Dunes. A grandmother in Silko’s treatment of the Ghost Dance sings a thematics of apocalyptic change in imagery from the example given by Wiget: “‘The whirlwind! The whirlwind! The snowy earth floats before me!’ Grandma Fleet sang loudly even after dancing hard four nights straight” (Gardens 32). In the context of the narrative, the grandmother is presented as singing the songs of the larger intertribal group.6 As an embedded ethnographic text, Silko’s narrative of Wovoka’s history in Gardens in the Dunes also emphasizes the transformative dimension of literature as Wiget defines it. Brown’s later history, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, appears to adopt a more clearly tribal-revolutionary and nativistic in-

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

123

terpretation of the prophecy of the Ghost Dance out of Mooney’s materials, pulling epigraphs for the chapter on ghost dancing that claim the future destruction of a temporarily dominant Anglo culture (416). Much of this ambiguity about the nature of tribal identity and religious sources in the historical record is engaged in Silko’s novel. In an early scene, an intertribal gathering of dancers see Wovoka, who accompanies the Messiah and his children, on the last night of the first ghost dance in Needles. The sighting becomes visionary in a strikingly hybrid way as the Holy Mother and the Messiah’s wife open their shawls and share orange squash blossoms with the gathering of dancers as a kind of tribal revision of the biblical manna from heaven (33). With the appearance of soldiers later that night, Wovoka and his family, with the Messiah, disappear into the hills, and this elusive travel pattern becomes a structurally repeating travel narrative. This circulating tribal story made of a narrative pattern of visionary appearances, escapes, and ambiguous identities is the novel’s structural revision of the anthropological account of findings and interviews, which offers a narrative with a repeating series of captures, repetitively stabilizing Wovoka’s identity and meaning. The novel’s structure implies that it is itself revising ethnographic fictions of intellectual capture and pure binary logic. Traveling Cultures and Archeological Plots: Tribal, Intertribal, Familial, Female In many subjects, the larger structure of Gardens in the Dunes emphasizes movement and noncapture, with an elusive open-endedness also part of the representation of ghost dances. The dances are interrupted before their culmination in four nights, because of military attempts to prevent large Native gatherings. So while the millenarian apocalypse is prevented for those specific moments, the novel also implies an ongoing future direction with a wide time scale, as dance gatherings are presumed to take place in the future, possibly even in the present time of the reader. Dance gatherings tend to produce syncretistic crossings of identities, perhaps best described through the late-twentieth-century anthropological concept of “traveling cultures.” Defined by James Clifford as dynamic rather than static cultural systems in a foundational text by that title, the term helps to emphasize the strong development of movement and performative narrative as key concepts in the dance, ethnographic, and plot structures in Silko’s novel. In one syncretistic development of a traveling culture, Gardens in the Dunes carefully develops the intersections of the Mormon Messiah movement with Wovoka’s Ghost Dance movement (also documented by Mooney, including documentation of the Mormon critique of dominant Anglo Christianity’s use of religion to establish white supremacy [792]). Mooney’s documentation shows that the Mormon church imagined that the “vine-

124

A. M. Regier

yard” of the Mormon Zion, America, would be given to the heirs of Joseph, one of the tribes of Israel, with the return of Indian lands “consecrating to them the wealth of the Gentiles.” This restoration of lands would follow the appearance of a prophet in the region of â•›Walker Lake, Nevada, and the ordination of twelve disciples, “in the presence of hundreds, representing scores of tribes or nations” (792–793). Silko’s novel offers corresponding scenes of intertribal gatherings waiting to see a messiah with a prophet, a holy mother, and eleven more figures, described as children. A child observer sees an example of a Mormon-tribal crossover experience at a dance: Early on the final night, Indigo got to see for herself what happened to a Mormon visited by his ancestors. The young man suddenly fell to his knees with his face in his hands, babbling and weeping before he slowly sank to the earth and lay quietly on his side, no different from any of the other dancers who visited with the spirits. Indigo was wide awake. This final night was the night the Messiah and his Holy Mother would come. (Gardens 32)

In a second hint of syncretism and traveling cultural identity formation, a universal language is imagined as part of the visionary quality of a radically pantribal world when Mormon presence is observed: “When the Mormons approached the Messiah, Sister Salt stayed nearby to listen for herself; she was amazed. As the Messiah gave his blessing to the Mormons, Sister Salt distinctly heard the words he spoke as Sand Lizard, not English, yet the Mormons understood his words and murmured their thanks to him” (Gardens 33–34). Universal language functions here in the narrative as a child’s vision of cross-cultural perception and understanding. Silko’s naming choices elsewhere in the novel similarly lead toward cross-cultural understandings. In an interview, Silko acknowledges that the term “Sand Lizard” is an intertribal fiction, named in this context to represent the many Colorado River tribes that had been destroyed in the era (Silko, “Listening” 172). Additionally, “Sand Lizard” evokes the snake imagery that will be discussed later in this essay as an index of a hybrid range of women’s cultures. The name “Sister Salt” also has a rich referential range, claiming a sibling relationship beyond her nuclear family to the character named Salt in D’Arcy McNickle’s Runner in the Sun. Salt, a character who was dedicated to saving a failing, pre-Hispanic Southwestern pueblo by establishing intertribal contact, offers a line of intertribal connection continued by Sister Salt. This imaginative recovery of cultural contact is grounded by a surprisingly syncretistic moment of encounter. Gardens in the Dunes opens with an early Ghost Dance gathering near Needles, California, (moved from the his-

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

125

toric Kingman site, according to Silko [Silko, “Listening” 172]), in the context of military removal of local tribes to the Parker reservation, and the systematic attempt to remove children to various Indian schools nationally. Two main plot lines involving the two sisters diverge as a logical result of the conflict between intertribal gatherings and Anglo forces dislocating Indian lives. From there, the novel continues to unfold via travels and syncretic encounters. The narrative structures of travel noted thus far suggest how productively the enunciatory spaces of the Ghost Dance movement generates a language of encounter: a literary momentum develops by which the novel unfolds as a further plotting of syncretic encounters.7 The violent displacement and eventual reuniting of women, particularly as part of a resonant metaphor of sibling relation, but eventually extending beyond the nuclear family, structures the first plot line. Indigo and Sister Salt first live in a Southwestern garden offered as a matrilineal version of Eden, but then systematically lose women: they lose their mother to Anglo military conflict over land, and then they lose their grandmother to natural aging and bury her within the garden. As each daughter’s relationship to the place is defined and then as each is displaced from her home in the “terraces in the dunes” (59), the land is plotted as the ground of female being, existing as female topography of form, both in its rounded exterior and its ancient, vulvar caverns. The human drama of young girls coming to consciousness and fertility, as a grandmother also comes to her full maturity and death, is both a narrative and an earth plot, an organic space of topography. The mapping traces the ongoing presence of female environmental culture despite and inside of great environmental wounding and change. This narrative topography echoes Silko’s sense of her relationship to place, as noted in a 1987 interview with Rolando Hinojosa: “I had always thought that New Mexico and the kind of higher terrains around west Albuquerque, around Laguna, the sandstone and lava, were my mother” (Silko, “Boss” 91). Silko’s maps of the desert Southwest are posed as alternatives to the national mapping of the US-Mexico border. Set less than fifty years after the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Gardens in the Dunes plots cultural encounters not controlled by the national politics of borders, including the crossings of Delena, a trickster and revolutionary with a long-term vision of resistance to the US border politics, who steals money to buy guns that are trafficked south of the border (463–464). Similarly, J. Hillis Miller urges the reader to see that topography as a speech act “is related to the politics of nationalism as they involve border demarcations and territorial appropriations” (5). The second plot line traces the hybrid cultural encounters the two sisters then have separately, before they reunite. The younger, Indigo, escapes from the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, and travels to England and Italy with a newly married but apparently celibate couple, as part of another

126

A. M. Regier

kind of captivity narrative (Huhndorf 191). International travel narratives develop because the husband is a scientist attempting to enter the financial markets of global capitalism via botanical commerce. The couple, Hattie and Edward, was originally brought together by each having scholarly interests, albeit in differing areas. However, as Edward’s science-related scholarship is increasingly linked to and revelatory of Victorian views of industry (and Silko’s larger critique of the history of industrial exploitation of the earth), the couple increasingly diverges. Hattie becomes frustrated both by her unconsummated marriage and the knowledge formations built into her husband’s commerce, and invests herself emotionally in Indigo’s development. Hattie undergoes a consciousness change as they travel to Europe with Indigo in tow, and both encounter the ancient artifacts of a prepatriarchal Old Europe as sexually and culturally charged; a female ground equivalent to the topography of the gardens of the American Southwest is found in the archeological underlay of Britain and Italy. The plot line of women’s travels in the novel follows the ideological fault lines of place and time. Silko has said that she originally conceptualized Hattie’s origins as a cross between Margaret Fuller and Alice James (Silko, “Listening” 179); like Margaret Fuller, Hattie earned access to an otherwise all-male scholarly education and, as the outcome of the novel shows, has a capacity for revolutionary actions. Like Alice James, she shows some symptoms associated with the forms of female hysteria linked to the gender and class biases of the late nineteenth century. During Indigo’s travels abroad with Hattie, Sister Salt ends up as part of a labor crew, displaced to a work camp on a river-dam project. She bears a child in a cross-cultural relationship there, develops friendships with Chemahuevi twins, and eventually returns to an area near the dunes. Upon her return, she builds a woman-centered community with the twins and her new child. Indigo eventually returns to find her sister, and Hattie attempts to have a relationship with the women, but has difficulty negotiating one across the cultural and class divides in the region. This double plot of sisters and multiplied others who function much like siblings perhaps “sisters the beam” of the novel, in the carpenter’s sense of adding structural support. The plot thus drives toward structuring two related but different desires: cross-cultural desire for hybrid identity and a search for a protofemaleness, both in an archeological layer under the historical events and through the many dislocations of Anglo-Native American encounters. Woundedness and the more potentially positive culture-changing or long-term, slow-burning revolutionary dimensions of traveling cultural identities and histories tend to be intertwined. The narrative traces both the ending of a group of ecologically situated tribes and an ongoing tribal presence. For example, Sister Salt recounts that the tribe historically valued “sex with strangers” in the interests of alliances, commerce, and friendships, rather than

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

127

valuing purist definitions of bloodlines; identity was established through matrilineal lines (202), which means that a tribal identity as Sand Lizards could be carried on despite intercultural contact, but which also means that tribal identity would be untraceable outside of the matrilineal context. The text contrasts these values to those of other tribes, who might “smother their half-breed babies” (204). Both Indigo and Sister Salt themselves were mixedblood children resulting from their mother’s captures and forced labors. The Chemehuevi twins with whom they develop a small women’s community come from a tribe that is historically syncretistic in some ways, but that seemed to be undergoing nationalist, tribal-separatist pressures. Similarly, Sister Salt perceives her child, resulting from intercultural contact at the river project, as a returning ancestor rather than a bicultural child diluting the blood line. Rather than considering the Sand Lizard tribe extinct, Silko presents tribal identity as a traveling construct, to borrow again from Clifford’s ethnographic theory, best understood through a model of cultural identity defined neither by “roots” nor “hybrid” contacts. Rather, “mediations of the two” are “constitutive of what will count as cultural” (Clifford 100–101). The novel does not purely define its sisters through their heritage and their original siting, but rather studies both their roots and their travels. Rather than doing a “nativistic” narrative archeology, Silko’s project digs up various kinds of original mestizaje.8 The narrative structure thus continually sisters its beams, in contrast to plot structures that may reclaim individual, particularized enunciatory spaces. Because the sisters are transnationally plotted, multiple implications develop, including both hybrid cultural identity (as originally bicultural) and more nativistic, usually singular conceptions of a protofemaleness. While the larger arc of the narrative thus traces a pattern Robert Nelson has seen as consistent within Silko’s body of work, namely, “contact, departure, and recovery” (“Laguna” 15), the contrasting plot lines index and claim an important set of historical cross-hatchings, from the international botanical collecting done both by an adult capitalist and a young Native American, to the cross-cultural comparative reclamations of woman-centered artifacts and culture. The home of identity and culture is insistently defined as originally syncretistic to a surprising degree: in an interview with Ellen Arnold, Silko suggests that this text “bring[s] Indians and Europeans together in a way that I don’t think has happened in a Native American novel” (Silko, “Listening” 171). Hattie and Indigo’s contact with prepatriarchal artifacts in their travels in Europe similarly charts an internal hybridity in Western cultural identity. Hybrid objects in the novel become the medium of a sort of cultural and spiritual transmission plot, causing later plot directions as characters come to extend their senses of self-identity through the accumulative, anthropological collecting plot of others and selves, in a novelistic plot-building pattern central

128

A. M. Regier

also to Almanac of the Dead. While Sister Salt makes herself a stone garden at the dam construction site to compensate for her loss of gardens in the dunes (215), Indigo is taken along with Hattie to visit Aunt Bronwyn’s “stone garden” (252), where they both learn stories of stones capable of mischievous animation (239), replacing themselves at night if moved, or having the heliocentric movements of plants (244). When the narrative presents kitchen gardens instead of stone gardens, characters are introduced to them as international gardens with elements from the Americas, Asia, and Africa (242). As Indigo hears a relationship between Old European notions of animated stones and stories from a Navajo storyteller from Needles, this experience also causes Hattie’s first sense of being drawn toward the US Southwest and tribal cultures, in the form of helping Indigo find her family (252). Thus, in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon homeland, characters experience a conscious, emotional pull toward transcultural hybridity, rather than toward homecoming. In this context, a variety of historically regeneration-related images arise, including white cows and bulls,9 and the spiritual aura of white light that haunts Hattie for the entire text. These haunting images also seem to figure whiteness and Anglo-Saxon social identity, but in forms emphasizing the mysterious, unknown, or unknowable aspects of whiteness, and thus a desirable call to otherness to Hattie’s otherwise acculturated consciousness (252, 282). The plot, driven by increasingly hybrid objects, then takes the characters further into an archeological reclamation of ancient Europe as they travel into Italy and the personal artifact collections of a professora there: in this sense, the archeology drives the topography of the plot much more than the characters. The professora’s artifact collections are characterized by female forms and hybrid animal-human forms dating from the Neolithic era: “In a niche of the garden wall, nearly hidden by the tall black gladiolus, sat a white pottery pitcher with black designs. When Hattie got closer she saw the spout of the pitcher was formed by a waterbird’s head and beak; but most amazing yet, on the chest of the waterbird were women’s breasts!” (298). The images of artifacts such as these seem closely tied to the “archeomythology” of Marija Gimbutas as the most likely source, in her structuralist analysis of a wide range of early art forms comprising prepatriarchal sign systems: Indigo sees figures, one of which was “seated and appeared mostly human, but she was painted with black-and-white stripes and over her belly a snake curled in a spiral. She felt a chill of excitement when she realized that the figure had snakes for arms!” (299). She becomes anxious to tell her sister of her discovery of cultural connectedness. This is the crisis point where Indigo’s narrative of her travel into Europe reveals connections to tribal meanings, an original hybridity that positions the human form not in binary separation from the animal world, but which integrates female and snake forms, human and animal relation, just as such systems and ways of being were presented as

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

129

integrated in Indigo’s early life experiences in the gardens in the dunes with her grandmother. For example, Indigo sees “a stone pedestal with a seated figure of carved sandstone that gazed at them with the round eyes of a snake. The snakeheaded mother had human arms and in them she cradled her snake baby to human breasts; but instead of legs, she had two snakes for limbs” (299). Gimbutas documents the archeological findings of such terracotta figures from between 6100 to 5700 BC (133) as part of a very widespread early goddess/ fertility culture, which she sees as an “authentic European heritage,” nonviolent and earth-centered, visible in the sign symbols of ancient art (xxi). The collecting plot culminates here, by showing snakes at the heart of an Old European history, as another challenge to binary cultural classification of snake-worshipping cultures as “savage” cultures, in contradistinction to those considered “civilized.” Similarly, the plot of Susan Power’s Grass Dancer culminates with the revelation of an originary connection to snakes in the life of the female agent of cultural change. Her family witnessed her taking a nap as a baby with rattlesnakes, and since then, she thinks of herself as “Red Dress, beloved of snakes” precisely when she is under pressure to identify herself in a way more acceptable to a Christian missionary (240).10 The archeological plot strategically plays upon a Foucauldian notion of an archeology of women’s history, as a female narrative reclamation of a female cultural sign system prior to writing. Catherine Clément has recently discussed this precultural space in questioning terms, as a “protospace, a timelessness—wherever it was before the Word was. Before the Beginning: a nonimprint, a nonplace, beyond the grip of the original techne, of the primordial furrow?” (Clément and Kristeva 72). The “primordial furrow” refers, in her work, to the original civilizational prohibitions and/or sexual actions that are the defining movements of technological civilizations creating marks of difference or other boundaries. Each example of an alternative historical garden, and the range of tensions and cultural issues indexed by each, raises the abstract issue of furrowing as the marking of territory and difference. A comparable novelistic engagement with the idea of the mythic garden and the “furrow” marking a community line of prohibition can be seen in Toni Morrison’s Paradise. This novel, like Silko’s, might be productively thought of as a narrative archeology of women’s histories. In Paradise, an interpretive split emerges in the community over the meaning of an object functioning like a cornerstone, with an historic inscription upon it that includes the word “furrow.” The historic phrase is inscribed on a giant outdoor stove inherited from the founding fathers of an intentionally all-African-American community, but the total phrasing is illegible; thus the illegible phrase can be processed by the community only as an archeology of the material culture of their history. One group within the community reads the stove as original

130

A. M. Regier

patriarchal prohibition: “Beware the Furrow of his Brow.” The other group sees a kind of politics of generational continuity through a once patriarchal but now inclusive command: “Be the Furrow of his Brow” (Morrison 93). The contested phrase has an important weight and resonance in connection with Clément’s phrasing of the original “furrow” as civilizational prohibition—the “furrow” is an original definitional cut or act of differentiation, loaded with all the overlays of the law of the father and the prohibitions upon which cultures define themselves (Clément and Kristeva 73). Morrison, ever probing community’s self-understandings, explores the productive illegibility of all inherited prohibitions: they cause communities to debate and affirm or deny their self-claimed identities and prohibitions. There is a grand mythical backdrop to Morrison’s oracular stove, as well: oracles always present riddles that are all the more elusive to answer within the cultural conditions and racial violence of particular historical and geographical spaces. Thus, the archeology of history in Silko’s text gains an epic scale by implying a profound attempt to reclaim the signs of life before patriarchal inscription and writing cultures. The cuts, or furrows, in works by Silko and Morrison resonate with the psychoanalytic histories cited above, but also refer to the furrows of industrial process in the wounding of the environment. Both Silko and Morrison, like the strong group of contemporary women writers of color documented by Nancy J. Peterson in Against Amnesia, “have approached history as a wound” (1). Gardens in the Dunes insistently defines history as the cross-cutting of wounded earth in cultural-commercial territories and potentially conceptualizes sexual difference as a parallel wounding. Whereas Peterson suggests that the “intense lyricism” and linguistic play of writers such as Morrison and Erdrich functions as a kind of latent response to trauma (13), Silko’s narratives have tended to stress more and more the materiality of history, often at the expense of lyricism. The need for the archival grounds, and Silko’s disciplined use of their enunciatory spaces, determines the language of the narrative, even when the hybrid objects may not be fully legible or translatable. The novel, as a compendium unfolding of hybrid collecting plots, is obligated to follow the trace of the patriarchal inscription in Edward’s concurrent, illegal attempt to appropriate citron cuttings for globalized trade. This plot reveals how he uses binary logic to read history, with an anxious corollary that a hierarchy of cultures depends upon binary definitional strategies such as associating “snake-worshipping” with non-Western cultures (303–304). Indigo, seeing evidence of snake-based historical art in Europe, explicitly makes transcultural leaps that trouble Edward: “Grandma Fleet used to talk to the big snake that lived at the spring above the old gardens; she always asked after the snake’s grandchildren and relatives and sent her best regards” (299).

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

131

Edward sees all such hybrid images as “far more monstrous than the centaur or minotaur” (299). Thus, Edward experiences the archeological dimensions of the traveling experience to be alienating, whereas Hattie and Indigo experience them as regenerating. For Indigo, the trip offers a discovery of a transcultural interface and even a kind of unifying field theory. For Hattie, a reclamation of female sexuality and power becomes possible. By her exposure to the artifacts, Hattie confronts more directly her own sexuality and its constant repression as taught by her earlier scholarly, albeit heretical, trip into the archives of â•›Western culture. In the archeological collection, she finds the history of her own sexuality at last, a carved stone “engraved with what appeared to be an eye on its end or the outline of a curled snake. She was about to reach out to touch its edge when suddenly she recognized it was a human vulva,” something that looks like an “incised egg” she is told was from “the fourth millennium in Macedonia” (292). Her physical and emotional state, characterized by a short-breathedness and contrasted to an earlier anxiety-related condition, charts a changing consciousness. The constantly comparative narrative makes her contact with the ancient, collective past of female sexuality a personally transformative event, equivalent to the personal transformation effected by ritual, collective poetry, and movement in ritual occasions such as the Ghost Dance. As her later plot trajectory suggests, Hattie’s narrative runs along the paradigmatic lines of Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (1915), in which the voyage out of a known “home” into cross-cultural spaces is a journey into a moving, fluid female subjectivity and a problematization of home constructions of sexuality, repression of sexuality, and gender roles in her culture.11 The scholarly archive that Hattie is driven from toward a discovery of an archeological past suggests that Silko’s work leans away from the textual word toward the earth world, where the written does not determine the archeological. The artifacts of history thus offer a kind of transmission plot, a kind of influence of the hybrid objects as originally hybrid objects, who communicate a further hybridity in the lives of those who are exposed: the stones in the plot become charged fetishes or touchstones driving eros in Hattie, her directionality toward the US Southwest, and finally toward female-centered communities in her final outcomes. The origins of such galvanizing, communicative power exist in both tribal and European sites related to the archive of the garden in history.12 However, the dialectically unfolding counterplot is an inversely negative contamination plot, although it does reconnect the transatlantic narrative back to the US Southwest. Edward dreams of mining meteorite stone in the American desert. Once he sees a stone that turns out to have been dressed in the tradition of the tribal fetish, wrapped and fed, and that reappears in a dream looking like a human baby (415). His mining attempts in

132

A. M. Regier

the service of global trade eventually are foiled by the profit schemes of his morphine-addicting doctor-partner, but the text hints that his contact with the fetish drives that destruction and is part of the larger sweep of historical spiritual resistance inherent in the fetish. This meteorite baby, dressed as a fetish, positions this novel as backstory and prequel to Almanac of the Dead, with its fetish object feeding the spiritual revolution of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.13 Whereas the transatlantic modernism of Anglo writings have tended to structure traveling plots as a trip into the theater of the other as a sort of ground in which to explore the Western world, as Chinua Achebe has argued powerfully, Gardens in the Dunes offers a kind of doubled recovery of syncretism and hybridity at the heart of the home, for both the Native American and Anglo-European topographies. The novel resists binary polarizations of culture and is as syncretistic as the mixed language in which Sister Salt sings to her child and ancestor: “Hour after hour she sang, and when she ran out of songs she sang sounds that were parts of words—Sand Lizard, Spanish, and English nonsense words seemed to calm him and drown out the noise best” (366). Extending the Ghost Dance Revolution: Modernist Arson as a Later Enunciation The final plot outcomes of Gardens in the Dunes include the return of Indigo and Sister Salt to a camp on the edge of Needles. A Ghost Dance gathering is being held there and is once again interrupted by soldiers before the final night of dancing. Hattie suffers a nearly deadly attack and rape in Needles, refuses to be taken home to her father’s care, and burns the livery stable of the perpetrator where she finds the mineral ore and gemstones she had with her at the time of the attack. The fire spreads to the town of Needles. For those watching from the site of the Ghost Dance, who had waited for millenarian change, the fire functions as a metonym. Hattie’s barn and town fire, metonymically burning down a culture, parallels the attempt to burn the patriarchal barn in William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” (1938), as well as the burning of colonial structures in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). That Hattie’s final arson in Gardens in the Dunes channels the perceived violence of the Ghost Dance movement into the literature of modernism reinforces the need to reflect on the subversive cultural challenges of literary revolution. Silko’s work provocatively suggests continuity between the Ghost Dance ritual songs, now included in the Heath Anthology of American Literature, and the culture-changing impulses of later American literature: this novel extends and strengthens the syncretistic religious echoes in Henry Adams’s call for images of Indian goddesses to equal the power of the dynamo-virgin, the American Transcendentalist

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

133

call for relationship to American environment and spirit, and Robinson Jeffers’s revelations of the spiritually evacuated industrial landscape of the early twentieth century. As part of a larger apocalyptic renewal of a world decayed by rapid industrialization, a syncretistic form of Christianity works in the novel as a reappropriated discourse in the service of a pantribal renewal in the Ghost Dancing movement.14 Similarly, Kathleen Norris, in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, briefly reflects upon the Ghost Dance as an ongoing revolution in the present, manifested in a syncretic Laguna-Christian melding, and in some forms of fundamentalisms of Anglo-Christian communities seeking to reappropriate past myths (37–38). The revolution tracked in this novel is both transatlantic and indigenous to the Americas: syncretism affects human beings who live in the Americas as part of the topography of the Americas, as a sort of slow-burning, unstoppable change, affecting and affected by the literary languages of history.

No t e s 1. See also Gerald Vizenor’s proposition that the “language of tribal novelists and poets could be a literary ghost dance, a literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivors.” 2. Catherine Rainwater’s chapter “Acts of Deliverance: Narration and Power” in Dreams of Fiery Stars offers a significant, rich grounding for an argument that the dynamics between oral storyteller and reader as listener-receiver exist in potentially powerful adaptations in contemporary Native American writings: “some Native American writers manage both power and solidarity in . . . a counter-colonial agenda. . . . [I]ts aim is not domination and empire, but social reform through relocation of non-Indian people from positions of authority to positions of listeners and receivers of knowledge” (9). 3. I draw the term and the ability to see the traces of this kind of discourse from Robert M. Nelson’s chapter “Rewriting Ethnography: The Embedded Texts in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony.” 4. Similarly, Brown’s text Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Christianizes his identity by referring to the excerpts from Mooney’s report to the Board of Ethnology in which Wovoka was seen as the messiah (432). 5. The restoration of the ecosystem as a key note of the ghost dance revolutionary vision is widely documented: see also Gill 164–167, Spicer 272–273, Wiget 42, as well as Mooney 661. 6. This Ghost Dance song appears close to a version documented by Mooney as a Paiute song. Its reference to the new earth, “here represented as white with snow, advancing swiftly, driven by a whirlwind,” appears in Arapaho songs as well, according to Mooney (1054). Several songs in Silko’s novel appear to be versions of the “Songs of the Paiute” found by Mooney (1052–1057). 7. Similarly, Shari Huhndorf suggests that intercultural interaction in Gardens in the Dunes is emphasized with the plotting of ghost dance history, and she develops a theme of “change and adaptation” rather than a binary polarity of cultures otherwise viewed in essentialist, static terms (196–197).

134

A. M. Regier

╇ 8. Silko has written powerfully about mestizaje in Native American and Mexican cultural identity in a 1994 article titled “The Border Patrol State.” There, she identifies an image resonant with an ongoing Aztlán narrative when watching northbound border crossings: the visionary moment of seeing Mexican nationals traveling north despite a militarized border invoked the historical vision of a larger, less divided sense of American identity in part based in the Indio myth of cultural origin in the northern site of Aztlán. This image counteracts the contemporary view of illegal border crossing in search of US economic advantage and of assimilation into a culture perceived as purely Anglo. In Gardens in the Dunes, Silko may be finding a functional parallel to the Aztlán narrative in the ghost dance movement; both offer historical models for forms of cultural identity based in a mestizaje. ╇ 9. Bulls function as widespread “symbols of regeneration” in both the ancient Near East and Old Europe, according to Marija Gimbutas (293). Noting, along with others, “the extraordinary likeness of the female uterus and fallopian tubes to the head and horns of a bull” (265), Gimbutas emphasizes, “In the end, it has become clear that the prominence of the bull in this symbolic system comes not from that animal’s strength and masculinity, as in Indo-European symbolism, but rather from the accidental similarity between its head and the female reproductive organs. The bull is not a god but essentially a symbol of becoming” (266). 10. Furthermore, Grass Dancer, like Gardens in the Dunes, positions the Ghost Dance movement in a central history chapter that is the key intertext to contemporary consciousness: the novel positions this history of cross-cultural encounter and violence as informing the present, and at times erupting into it (280–281). 11. Silko’s work is important to see as part of feminist resistance to essentialist feminist theories. Erica Johnson’s work on Woolf ’s The Voyage Out is helpful if applied to the female travel narratives in Gardens in the Dunes: “By focusing on not only configurations of gendered subjectivity, then, but on the movements of gendered subjects, feminist theorists implicitly dismantle any static definition of female subjectivity, for the very concept of the gendered subject in motion is open to and constituted by shifting, diverse models of female subjectivity” (66). 12. See A. S. Byatt’s very British novel The Virgin in the Garden, which similarly emphasizes textual scholars discovering the less textual and more touchoriented archeological grounds of female sexuality in another mythologically overlaid garden: On Fylingdales Moor, as I told you, there are over 1000 small stone cairns. Over 1000. One of the things I’ve found out in my reading is that the very early gods—and goddesses, Aphrodite for instance—were just pillars or cairns or cones of stone. I think that was a system of calling down power, a field of force, of terminals. They are—ah—touchstones,” he said, smiling with a touch of his ancient brightness over this last revelatory double-entendre. (341)

13. See Regier for a related discussion of the fetish object in Almanac of the Dead that becomes politically operative as a result of the “charged and changing relationship between sacred objects and ‘impure,’ nonsacred objects now affected by tribal belief systems” (190–191). 14. Many critics note the profoundly world-changing potential of storytelling as conceptualized in Silko’s work. Denise K. Cummings suggests that the form of Gardens in the Dunes as drawn from nineteenth-century classic novels shows Silko’s

Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing

135

sense of storytelling as a kind of “spatial history” that makes possible historical change (86). While Catherine Rainwater’s 1999 book Dreams of Fiery Stars does not include treatment of Gardens in the Dunes, Rainwater makes a strong argument that the larger corpus of work has a strongly revolutionary direction: both “Hogan and Silko portray ‘Indian’ realities on the verge of eclipsing the dominant, or Eurocentric reality. . . . [A]s long as stories give birth to stories, the 500-year revolution goes on” (141).

Wor k s Ci t e d Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Heart of Darkness: A Norton Critical Edition. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988. 251–261. Aldama, Arturo J. Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Self-Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Barnett, Louise K., and James L. Thorson, eds. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Bhabha, Homi. “Life at the Border: Hybrid Identities of the Present.” New Perspectives Quarterly 14.1 (1997). Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Bethel College Library 15 March 2003 . Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, 1979. Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden. New York: Vintage, 1978. Clément, Catherine, and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 96–116. Cummings, Denise K. “‘Settling’ History: Understanding Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 12.4 (2000): 65–90. Erdrich, Louise. The Master Butchers Singing Club. New York: Harper, 2003. Gill, Sam D. Native American Traditions: Sources and Interpretations. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1983. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. New York: Harper, 1991. Huhndorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Johnson, Erica. “Contours of Travel and Exile in The Voyage Out.” Journal of Narrative Theory 31 (2001): 65–86. McNickle, D’Arcy. Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize. 1982. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. Miller, J. Hillis. Topographies. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee. 1896. New York: Dover, 1973. Morrison, Toni. Paradise. 1997. New York: Plume, 1999. Nelson, Robert M. “A Laguna Woman.” Barnett and Thorson 15–22. ——— . “Rewriting Ethnography: The Embedded Texts in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony.” Telling the Stories: Essays on American Indian Literatures and Cultures. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 47–58. Norris, Kathleen. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Boston: Houghton, 1993. Owens, Louis. Bone Game. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.

136

A. M. Regier

Peterson, Nancy J. Against Amnesia: Contemporary American Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Power, Susan. The Grass Dancer. New York: Berkley, 1995. Rainwater, Catherine. Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Regier, A. M. “Material Meeting Points of Self and Other: Fetish Discourses and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Evolving Conception of Cross-Cultural Narrative.” Barnett and Thorson 185–206. Rowe, John Carlos. “Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality.” PMLA 118 (2003): 78–89. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin, 1991. ——— . “The Border Patrol State.” Nation 17 Oct. 1994: 412–415. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Bethel College Library 6 Aug. 2002. . ——— . “The Boss I Work For Dialogue: Leslie Marmon Silko and Rolando Hinojosa.” Interview with Rolando Hinojosa. Silko, Conversations 84–96. ——— . Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Ed. Ellen L. Arnold. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. ——— . Gardens in the Dunes. New York: Simon, 1999. ——— . “Listening to the Spirits: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko.” With Ellen Arnold. Silko, Conversations 162–196. Spicer, Edward. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest 1533–1960. 1962. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976. Vizenor, Gerald. “Native American Indian Literature: Critical Metaphors of the Ghost Dance.” World Literature Today 66.2 (1992): 5. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Bethel College Library 3 Dec. 2004 . Wiget, Andrew. Native American Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

G ary T otten

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism: Nations, Narratives, and Critical Traditions

A

lthough Yankton Sioux writer Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin, 1876– 1938) was, as P. Jane Hafen notes, “virtually unknown for many decades” (Dreams 165), much critical work has appeared since Dexter Fisher’s 1979 article, “Zitkala-Ša: Evolution of a Writer.” Some critics desiring to bring Zitkala-Ša into the conversation about turn-of-the-century American women writers have done so recently under the auspices of literary regionalism. Martha Cutter has demonstrated Zitkala-Ša’s problematic relationship to autobiographical conventions, concluding that Zitkala-Ša’s life-writing “violates” traditional patterns of autobiography because “it does not put forth a model of triumph and integration, nor does it emphasize the importance of language in the overall process of self-authentication” (31). If, as Cutter argues, we cannot, in the context of autobiography criticism, “expect her writing to legitimate the very institutions (the English language, writing, culture, and ‘civilization’) which have suppressed her” (31), then how can we expect her texts to conform to traditional expectations for regionalist texts? Critics approaching Zitkala-Ša as a regionalist fall into two camps: those reading her work within a regionalist framework and those reading her work in terms of how it expands our conception of regionalism and the regionalist canon. Including Indigenous texts in the canon is crucial, but without a change in critical paradigms, such an effort ignores the dissonance American Indian Quarterly, Volume 29, Numbers 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2005): pp. 84–123. Copyright © 2005 University of Nebraska Press.

137

138

Gary Totten

between Indigenous texts and traditional critical categories and, ultimately, fails to transform the study of American literature. In her analysis of American realism and canon change, Elizabeth Ammons argues that critical terminology must transform to reflect the pluralism of American literature and argues against relying on “preconceived inherited theories about American literature” (103) in criticism. While critical work on regionalism has moved toward a discussion of cultural difference (for example, recent articles by Sandra Zagarell and Cynthia Davis on otherness in Jewett or Stephanie Foote’s Regional Fictions), white writers and texts often remain at the center of such analyses. Even when writers from outside the dominant culture are included in the regionalist canon, this inclusion is often accomplished through the “inherited theories” Ammons mentions, rather than with critical approaches appropriate to Indigenous literatures.1 Various critics have responded to the need for appropriate critical approaches to Indigenous literatures.2 In The Voice in the Margins, Arnold Krupat observes, similar to Ammons, that critical poetics must be reformulated to account for American Indian literature and that “[t]o urge the inclusion of Indian literature in the canon of American literature . . . is not only to propose an addition but a reevaluation of what↜‘American literature’ means” (98). Unfortunately, as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn observes, characterizing Indigenous texts as the voice “at the margin” or at the “center of the margin,” as John Beverley does in his essay, “The Margin at the Center,” further negates “what it is that natives have had to say” (Cook-Lynn, “How Scholarship Defames the Native Voice” 81). Cook-Lynn further concludes that [c]ontemporary American Indian Fiction is sustained as such by non-Indian publishers and editors, critics and scholars for EuroAnglo canonical reasons (some might even suggest imperialistic reasons) rather than for either the continuation of indigenous literary traditions and development of nationalistic critical apparatuses or for the sake of simple intellectual curiosity. (“The American Indian Fiction Writer” 35)

To counter such imperialistic literary practices, Paula Gunn Allen envisions a “critical system that is founded . . . on actual human society and relationships rather than on textual relations alone” (309), suggesting that critics cannot simply look for overlaps between canonical texts and the themes and concerns of Indigenous texts. Craig Womack, who views the Native and American literary canons as separate (7), further resists such an overlap and argues that Indigenous peoples should have an “increasingly important role in evaluating tribal literatures” (1), emphasizing, as Elizabeth CookLynn argues, that “the right to speak for oneself and one’s people . . . is as

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

139

fundamental as food and decent housing” (“How Scholarship Defames the Native Voice” 80). Womack seeks a Native literary criticism that privileges “Native critical centers,” works “from within the nation, rather than looking toward the outside” (12), “emphasizes Native resistance movements against colonialism, confronts racism, discusses sovereignty and Native nationalism, seeks connections between literature and liberation struggles, and . . . roots literature in land and culture” (11).3 Clearly, dominant literary and critical traditions provide an inadequate paradigm for the study of Indigenous texts; indeed, the works of Zitkala-Ša and other Indigenous writers are more responsibly read and taught as counter-critical and counter-cultural to such a paradigm. The “problem” of regionalism in my title refers to this disjunction between dominant critical paradigms and Indigenous texts. In his study of the problem of American realism, Michael Davitt Bell suggests that though the ideas of realism and naturalism “may be little more than figments of our literary-historical imaginations,” they have been “thoroughly functional” ideas, serving various purposes for both nineteenth-century writers and current critics (4). I wish to propose a semantically similar but ideologically different inquiry and ask what purposes traditional literary-historical classifications have served in the literary criticism and histories of Indigenous texts; such a study highlights, particularly for non-Indigenous critics, the ethnocentric nature of American literary history and critical paradigms.4 Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends (1901), the essays and fiction of American Indian Stories (published in 1921, but containing pieces written as early as 1900), and her later political writings are not just expansive or disruptive (in terms of the canon) but defy the nationalistic agendas and colonizing effects of aesthetic categories and critical assumptions, specifically in relation to theories of American regionalist writing, and expose the complexity and contradictions of critical paradigms. The Critical Uses of Regionalism American literary regionalism owes much of its problems to the ways it has been defined and used. Regionalism is a sloppy and contested term at best and has been stretched beyond its limits to accommodate various writers and texts. In her 1956 essay, “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty refers to “regional” as a “careless term, as well as a condescending one. . . . ‘Regional’ is an outsider’s term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing, because as far as he knows, he is simply writing about life” (548). Welty’s argument challenges regionalism’s critical distinctiveness; indeed, according to Welty’s statement, everything in fiction could be said to originate in the local. Recent critical studies of regionalism tend to emphasize a more positive reading of the term’s openness, looking, as Richard Brodhead does, for

140

Gary Totten

ways it opens up literary access to a wider range of writers (118). Stephanie Foote notes that regionalism “provided a way for ethnic writers and subjects to enter into the mainstream of American literature,” for example, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Charles Chesnutt, and Abraham Cahan (“Cultural Work of Regionalism” 37), although this view also allows critics to assimilate such literature into the mainstream, rather than acknowledge the culturally specific criticism required for its interpretation. In their introduction to Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, Sherrie Innes and Diana Royer view regionalism as a critical category that evolves along with critical theory and academic disciplines. However, if we consider the nature of regionalism’s evolution in relation to non-white writers, we observe that this change usually occurs as an effort to include more writers of color as regionalists, rendering the term even more careless, rather than as an actual change in thinking about regionalism. If issues of race and culture influence readings of regionalist writers, then theories of regionalism must reflect that influence as well. Charles L. Crow begins to reflect this awareness in his introduction to A Companion to the Regional Literatures of the America, where he notes that, in addition to geography, regionalism is about the “major problems and concerns of national history,” including “slavery,” “the place of indigenous people,” and “women’s rights.” Sometimes, Crow notes, the “regional approach . . . even challenges the wisdom of studying literature packaged according to nation-states” (2). However, beyond simply asking, as Crow does, “Is there really an American literature, or . . . only a collection of regional literatures?” (2), we must investigate the implications of such a question for Indigenous culture and literary production. Despite regionalism’s supposed theoretical latitude, criticism of regionalist texts fails to respond to the dynamic nature of Indigenous culture and identity. Werner Sollors observes that the dominant culture constructs ethnicities and nationalisms as stable and timeless ideas to serve dominant ideologies (xiii–xiv); criticism of regionalist literature produces a similar effect by representing local life as knowable (i.e., stable and timeless) and ethnic difference within a region as simply another fixed idea. Considering this tendency in relation to Zitkala-Ša’s work, it is clear that she is writing neither a fixed ethnicity nor a stable and timeless region, for the culture and place that she writes about are, during the very moment she writes about them, undergoing dramatic changes. Elisabeth Luther Cary, in a 1902 review of Zitkala-Ša’s autoÂ� biographical Atlantic essays, emphasizes the essays’ ↜belatedness, noting how Zitkala-Ša highlights “the finer aspects of the old order—which, for [her], . . . has changed forever” (21). Zitkala-Ša registers this cultural change even before she leaves for the eastern boarding school. When her brother, Dawée, comes home after three years of boarding school, his return influences Zitkala-Ša’s mother to “take a farther step from her native way of living” (“Impressions”

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

141

45), indicated through changes in her home: “[f ]irst it was a change from the buffalo skin to the white man’s canvas that covered our wigwam. Now she had given up her wigwam of slender poles, to live, a foreigner, in a home of clumsy logs” (45). As a child in this “clumsy” and foreign home, Zitkala-Ša hangs on her mother’s knee, naively hoping that she, too, might travel away to the land of “red apples” (46) where she will experience further cultural change. By the time Zitkala-Ša writes her autobiographical essays, the changes are even more pronounced, and her mother has embraced what Zitkala-Ša refers to in “Why I Am a Pagan” as “the new superstition” of Christianity” (803), though Zitkala-Ša would convert to Catholicism later in her life and placed her son, Ohiya, in a Midwestern Catholic boarding school in 1913 (Hafen, Dreams 126). Because Zitkala-Ša is writing about a way of life that has survived rapid change, she interprets identity, geography, and everyday reality in response to such change, a form of textual, cultural, and psychological work which explicitly works against the universalizing tendencies of dominant ideologies and which white regionalists do not undertake in their texts. Contemporary criticism of Zitkala-Ša’s work often veils these important differences between white and Indigenous writers through a process of cultural-critical appropriation. By examining the effects of criticism that reads Zitkala-Ša as a regionalist, my intention is not to disparage the work of other critics. These critical appraisals represent needed debate and scholarship about Zitkala-Ša’s work. Indeed, as Patricia Okker argues, more scholarship on Indigenous writers such as Zitkala-Ša is crucial to the understanding and approach to such texts, both critically and pedagogically (98). But a metacritical perspective on this scholarship can also alert us to the ways in which traditional interpretive paradigms and assumptions perpetuate the appropriation of Indigenous texts. For example, in an article comparing Sarah Orne Jewett and Zitkala-Ša, D. K. Meisenheimer Jr. notes Zitkala-Ša’s resistance to the “elegiac ethnography of the regionalist genre,” which eulogizes regions and cultures and is a prevalent device in Jewett’s fiction (121) but ultimately inscribes Zitkala-Ša’s work within theories of literary regionalism. He suggests that both writers utilize “[o]ne of regionalism’s most distinctive topoi[,] . . . people and landscape, culture and nature, as functions of each other” (110), but argues that Zitkala-Ša circumvents regionalist genre expectations (which, he suggests, she used to satisfy the audience of her Harper’s and Atlantic pieces) by embracing an “immanent” spirituality (119).5 Though Zitkala-Ša appears to challenge more regionalist characteristics than she sustains in Meisenheimer’s reading, a regionalist framework finally allows Meisenheimer to read Zitkala-Ša as “region embodied, the cultural-natural aspects of her native region [being] embodied in her own person as an inherently movable quality” (121). If this reading grants Zitkala-Ša a certain physical and social mobility, and, as

142

Gary Totten

Meisenheimer argues, supports the “Indian view of a nondichotomous spiritbody [which] sees her presence as spiritually and culturally rooted regardless of her whereabouts” (119), it also places her in the problematic position of representative Sioux woman. Furthermore, while Meisenheimer’s reading might liberate Zitkala-Ša’s texts and self from the eulogized region, to read her as “region embodied” does not account for the significant cultural (as well as textual) consequences of Zitkala-Ša’s “whereabouts” in relation to the taking of Indian lands or acknowledge how, as Kathryn Shanley notes, the “effort to retain land bases, recover lost territories, and hang on to hunting, water, mineral, and other rights associated with living in a particular place” is a central political issue for Indigenous peoples (“‘Born from the Need to Say’” 3). Other critics, such as Donna Campbell, demonstrate, perhaps unintentionally, the incompatibility between Zitkala-Ša’s texts and the white regionalist aesthetic. In Resisting Regionalism, Campbell briefly acknowledges Zitkala-Ša’s important contribution to early-twentieth-century women’s literature as a writer of color who offers a new perspective on American experience, but, perhaps because Zitkala-Ša’s work does not lend itself to the careful formulas of regionalism that Campbell lays out, Zitkala-Ša does not appear in Campbell’s extended analysis of mostly white women regionalists. Campbell distinguishes the women local colorists from the male naturalists through three chief characteristics. First, through this fiction, women writers stage a “quiet rebellion” against the “destructive . . . forms imposed by an idealistic male culture (represented often by ministers) upon a community of women” (24). Writing in her autobiography of her Christian boarding school experience and, in her essay “Why I Am a Pagan,” of her encounter with an Indigenous preacher, Zitkala-Ša also registers the destructive nature of regulatory patriarchal institutions and practices, but not solely in terms of their effects on female communities. In the autobiography, for example, she rebels against the dominant culture’s destructive practices through her outrage when, during a college oratorical contest, the opposing team displays a banner bearing the image of a “forlorn Indian girl” with the word “squaw” below (“School Days” 194). Zitkala-Ša’s anger stems as much from the banner’s racist message as from its misogynist language. She claims that the banner represents, for her, the “strong prejudice against my people” (193) and a visual counterpart to the “slurs against the Indian that stained the lips of our opponents” (193). To effectively rebel against such racist discourse, she must master and then effectively wield the English language of her oppressors; ultimately, she demonstrates linguistic power by winning a prize in the oratorical contest and penning her version of the event in the autobiography. In “Why I Am a Pagan,” she rebels more subtly against Christianity’s attempts to obliterate Indigenous belief by reminding her readers that “the pale-faced missionary and the hoodooed aborigine are both God’s creatures” (803) and

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

143

by imagining what was unthinkable at the time: a multicultural nation in which all races co-mingle as a “living mosaic of human beings” (802). Zitkala-Ša’s work responds in similar ways to the other characteristics of women’s local color fiction, which Campbell identifies. Campbell argues that female local colorists affirm “self-denial and acceptance not only as necessary survival tactics but as the means of creating a genuine, if attenuated, satisfaction in life” (24). Additionally, through the motif of storytelling, female local color writers emphasize “a homogeneous, empathic audience, insisting that stories are incomplete until they are shared” and preserved (24); storytelling builds and sustains community. Zitkala-Ša clearly does not accept or value cultural loss, and her refusal to do so gives the autobiography the melancholy tone, unconventional form, and dissatisfying ending that, as Cutter notes, distinguishes the text from traditional autobiographies in form and content. Zitkala-Ša insists that the boarding school’s “iron routine” threatens to destroy her culture and individuality and that the “melancholy of those black days” overshadows her life long after she leaves the school. The “sad memories rise above those of smoothly grinding school days,” expressed through her mournful voice “which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear” (“School Days” 190) this story that refuses to celebrate self-effacement and cultural loss. In relation to the motif of storytelling, Zitkala-Ša, like white women local colorists, celebrates storytelling as a means of communal sharing and cultural preservation; she and her friends imitate their mothers, behaving as storytellers and listeners in the manner that they have learned from their mothers, and saying “only those things that were in common favor” (“Impressions” 41). However, when speaking to the broader audience beyond childhood friends, Zitkala-Ša does not take for granted the empathy of her mostly white reading audience, many of whom, like the “palefaces” she first encounters at the boarding school, have “ears . . . [that] could not hear [her]” (“School Days” 186). Indeed, her boarding school story is meant to document the cultural destruction inflicted by her audience rather than to celebrate a shared experience with her audience, and the trope of storytelling as preservation in her fiction, for example “The Trial Path,” which I further discuss below, must be understood in light of such threats to Indigenous culture and, thus, as serving a different cultural function than that in the work of white women writers. That language functions in a communal way in both white regionalist texts written by women and in American Indian culture seems to have allowed a critical appropriation of Indigenous texts into a tradition of regionalism more readily than, as Cutter’s argument demonstrates, into a tradition of autobiography. Within a regionalist context, Campbell observes that the motif of storytelling as communal sharing manifests itself in terms of domestic acts

144

Gary Totten

such as “knitting, making quilts, braiding rugs, distilling essences, and putting up preserves” (41). In contrast, Susan Bernardin demonstrates how Zitkala-Ša, by employing the domestic, “debunks the premises of the Americanization project” (232). Bernardin maintains that by focusing her story on the domestic themes of home life and family relationships while simultaneously and “subversively engag[ing] with the indoctrination of sentimental ideology in boarding schools and on reservations” (218), Zitkala-Ša “selectively” utilizes the discourse of domesticity to critique “sentimental ideology’s foundational role in compulsory Indian education” and its corresponding “participation in national efforts to ↜‘Americanize’↜ the Indian” (213). Given the differences between the use and meaning of the domestic, communal sharing, and the storytelling in white women’s texts and Zitkala-Ša’s texts, Campbell is quite right not to submit Zitkala-Ša’s work to her critical paradigm for women’s regionalist works, for such a Eurocentric reading would, as Elaine Jahner argues, “force American Indian literature into a non-Indian frame of reference,” and, as is often the effect of such an analysis, create the impression that Indigenous works are somehow “lacking” (“Critical Approach” 212).6 Zitkala-Ša’s uneasy relationship with regionalism is most apparent in Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse’s 1992 Norton anthology of American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910. Fetterley and Pryse argue that Zitkala-Ša shares with other women regionalists a concern about how place and her relationship with her mother shape her identity. Granted, Zitkala-Ša does link her mother with her left-behind region and, ultimately, with her identity, but, as Hafen notes, “American Indian authors write about land with an imperative that goes beyond establishing setting or creating a descriptive backdrop for action and characters. Land gives life, identity, and wisdom to tribal communities. Land is the center of language, culture, and existence” (“Indigenous Peoples” 169). Indeed, the image of her mother, “on the Western plains . . . holding a charge” against her (“School Days” 194) fuels the cultural estrangement and identity crisis that haunts Zitkala-Ša through the remainder of her autobiography. This image underscores, in Hafen’s words, an “imperative” underlying issues of region and identity (both self and cultural) for ZitkalaŠa that white women writers and characters do not share and emphasizes her difficult task of negotiating an identity while she is unwelcome and isolated in the dominant culture’s educational and social systems, estranged from her mother, alienated from her culture and lands, and obliged to communicate in a language other than her own if she wishes to be heard. Fetterley and Pryse also align Zitkala-Ša with Sarah Orne Jewett’s representative regionalism, suggesting that the “grandmother-storyteller” and “granddaughter-listener” in her story “The Trial Path” might “remind” readers of the relationship between narrators and listeners in Jewett’s work (534). In addition to the different cultural meanings associated with the two writers’

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

145

narrative strategies and with their respective narrators and narratees, the details surrounding the publication of Zitkala-Ša’s story also highlight the differences between them. Published in Harper’s Monthly in October 1901, “The Trial Path” appeared in the same issue as an installment of Woodrow Wilson’s serialized article, “Colonies and Nations: A Short History of the United States,” in which Colonel George Washington arrives at Congress and is consulted about “question[s] of military preparation,” including “the protection of the frontier against the Indians” (792). In the previous month’s issue of the magazine, James Mooney’s article, “Our Last Cannibal Tribe,” details the supposed cannibalism of various American Indian tribes, particularly the Tonkawas near San Antonio, using “evidence” that is often secondhand or hearsay. While Wilson’s piece emphasizes American Indians’ problematic relationship to U.S. nation-building, the article by Mooney, who also challenged ZitkalaŠa’s view of peyote use and accused her of being a fraud in his testimony before the Senate subcommittee on peyote, exposes white culture’s unreasonable fears of the Other and propagates the racism and misunderstanding with which Indigenous writers were contending in literary print culture and in the larger culture of the United States, forces which did not affect Jewett. Within the story itself, Zitkala-Ša’s narrative strategies establish an ideological position on the acts of storytelling and listening that, contrary to Fetterley and Pryse’s claims, differs dramatically from that of Jewett and demonstrates, as Jahner argues, that “American Indian writing need not always be the object of critical inquiry . . . [but] can also generate critical positions” (“Metalanguages” 178). Zitkala-Ša marks the ideological difference between her text and white regionalist texts through shifts in verb tense, emphasizing how the story is brought into present being and, thus, contemporary significance, through the grandmother’s retelling. The story begins in past tense, with the third-person narrator establishing the setting through the opening phrase, “It was an autumn night on the plain” (741), but as the grandmother rises from her prone position to tell her story to her twentyyear-old granddaughter, the immediacy of the act is reflected in the change to present tense: “Though once she had lain down, the telling of a story has aroused her to a sitting posture. Her eyes are tight closed. With a thin palm she strokes her wind-shorn hair” (741). The responses of the granddaughterlistener are also given in present tense to emphasize the cultural significance of the story to the present life of the granddaughter. However, the “soft rich voice” of the granddaughter “floats through the darkness[,] . . . passes into the ear of the toothless old [grandmother],” the narrator recounts, and then flies across time, “over many winter snows, till at last it cleaves the warm light atmosphere of her grandfather’s youth.” From this place in the past, the narrator says, “her grandmother made answer” (741). Although the grandmother lapses into past tense at two points in her tale, she narrates the actual

146

Gary Totten

trial-path experience of the story’s murderer and his eventual reconciliation with the victim’s family in the present tense. Whenever the grandmother pauses, the narrator describes the scene of the telling in the past tense, since the story itself has become the present, and once the story ends, the tense again shifts to the past. By simultaneously placing the grandmother and granddaughter in the story’s past and present, bringing the past to the present through the story’s verb tense, and using the grandmother as the vehicle through which the granddaughter’s voice (by passing into the grandmother’s ear) can also exist in the past, Zitkala-Ša emphasizes the ways in which Indigenous culture is transmitted and preserved through the telling of and listening to stories. “The Trial Path” reveals the importance of storytelling and listening in Indigenous culture, but the literary context of the story raises questions about the ability of the Harper’s audience, similar to Zitkala-Ša’s white teachers at the boarding school, to receive or “listen” to an Indigenous voice. However, as Vanessa Holford Diana observes of Zitkala-Ša’s writing in American Indian Stories, she “play[s] . . . [with] her white audience’s expectations and preexisting world view” (155) in order to make her point at the end of “The Trial Path.” At the conclusion of the tale, the grandmother finds her granddaughter asleep, and exclaims, “Hinnu! hinnu! Asleep! I have been talking in the dark, unheard. I did wish the girl would plant in her heart this sacred tale” (744). The changing verb tenses of ↜“The Trial Path” not only highlight the grandmother’s relationship to the events she narrates, but also emphasize, through the present tense of the story and the granddaughter’s response, the importance of the oral tradition to the Sioux present (in terms of cultural identity) and future (in terms of cultural preservation). Though the granddaughter fails to receive the entire story and, by falling asleep, threatens the preservation of the tale, the grandmother drifts off to sleep under a “guardian star,” which “beamed compassionately down upon the little tepee [sic] on the plain” (744), suggesting the story’s ultimate protection. Lost stories are serious matters in Indigenous culture, and Zitkala-Ša’s storytellers and listeners have much more to lose than Jewett’s storytellers and listeners. Indeed, Jahner notes that “in a minority context where history has been kidnapped by conquerors and its voices muffled in an effort to induce an emptiness that could be filled by the dominant people’s past[,] . . . the act of listening to the past is approached with extraordinary care,” and the links to the past created through re-tellings of myths, histories, and stories “requires an intellectual response that allows the act of listening to the past to achieve its communicative potential” (“Metalanguages” 162). Ultimately, “The Trial Path” attempts to establish the cultural significance of the oral tradition for readers apathetic, if not opposed, to its meaning and significance. By playing with the disparate views of her white readers and the Indigenous characters in the story, Zitkala-Ša critiques her readers’ ignorance and

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

147

dismissal of Indigenous stories and emphasizes her concern about whether any compassionate ears will hear her own story. The appearance of Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical and fictional work in major literary magazines also raises the issue of her facility with the English language. Fetterley and Pryse suggest that by attaining the language that could have given her a career as a prominent regionalist writer, Zitkala-Ša loses the connection to her place and region. However, she forfeits that career (the promise of such indicated by the “regionalist elements” in her work) by deciding to be a reformer and a political activist. According to this logic, however, Zitkala-Ša never could have made the choice to be a regionalist; she cannot be a regionalist if the attainment of a literary language (English) compromises her connection to a region, yet she has to write in English if she is to be accepted by the literary community as a bona fide regionalist. The effects of learning and using English emphasize Zitkala-Ša’s problematic relationship to a region and culture experiencing dramatic change, including the threat to Indigenous language. Although her peers on the reservation speak English at their social gatherings (“School Days” 192) and she uses English as a form of resistance throughout her writings, her autobiography suggests that attaining the language does not bring her acceptance among them, but further distances her from her home, family, and culture. She wants to burn the Indian Bible that her mother offers her as consolation, and calls the book “a perfect delusion to [her] . . . mother” who has now accepted its tenets (192). In the autobiography, Zitkala-Ša’s culture slips away from her faster than her faith in it, as symbolized by the magic roots she takes with her to school, of which she writes, “before I lost my faith in the dead roots, I lost the little buckskin bag containing all my good luck” (192). As symbols of the cultural loss sustained while attaining the power of the “white man’s papers” and ways (“Indian Teacher” 386), the lost buckskin bag and her alienation from her peers and family not only call attention to the contradictions that Zitkala-Ša must embrace in order to resist white culture, but also emphasize her problematic relationship with regionalism. Without culture, language, or region she cannot be a regionalist, and by using the English language she cannot be a regionalist. Either way, Zitkala-Ša’s literary production falls short, made “lacking,” as Jahner would argue, in a “non-Indian frame of reference” (“Critical Approach” 212), and demonstrating the complications produced by criticism that attempts to establish Zitkala-Ša as a potential, if not fullfledged, regionalist writer. Nation/Narration Zitkala-Ša’s relationship to regionalism is further complicated by regional literature’s relationship with U.S. nationalism. In one sense, regionalism seems to work against nationalism and hearken back to an earlier sectionalism;

148

Gary Totten

however, in glorifying prototypical American regions, manners, and characteristics, regionalism celebrates the stability and timelessness of local American values as a projection of national values. Foote notes that through its emphasis on rural life and characters, “regional writing constructs a common national past for readers,” a phenomenon which is common in “consolidating nations” (Regional Fictions 6). However, Foote also suggests that a critical reevaluation of regionalism demonstrates that, rather than “representing a common national past,” regionalism helps “construct” such a past “in the face of, and out of the raw material of, the increasing immigration and imperialism of the nineteenth century” (13). In this light, regionalism has functioned as a way to write national literature and culture into existence. When William Dean Howells considered the question of a national American literature in his November 1891 “Editor’s Study,” he suggested that the closest we get to national literature (at least from the perspective of European critics) is Walt Whitman, whose work Howells characterizes as formless. Because literary forms have all been invented by the Europeans, Howells claims that American writers resort to a representative formlessness (963), a situation that generates a sort of national identity crisis; for if nations long for form through their narratives, depending, as Timothy Brennan argues, “for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role” (49), then the formlessness of America’s literature also calls the status of the nation into question. Regionalism responds to this anxiety about a national literary form, and thus a national identity, by filling a need for a distinctive American literary form. In December 1895 an Atlantic Monthly reviewer of Hamlin Garland’s Crumbling Idols, containing essays on local color in art, notes the nationalist zeal of the pieces and describes the essays as “so many explosions of literary Jingoism” (“New Figures in Literature and Art” 840). Echoing previous works such as Emerson’s “The American Scholar” or Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” in Crumbling Idols, Garland calls for authentic and local American art. He bemoans the lack of attention to the “mighty West” in literature, blaming the American propensity for hard work and lack of leisure time for having “calloused the perceiving mind” to the “art-possibilities of common American life” (16). The implicit link between nation and region made earlier in the book becomes explicit when he later explores the question of Pacific-Coast literature, noting that when the “real Pacific literature” appears, it will be “a literature as no other locality could produce, a literature that could not have been written in any other time,” the “test,” says Garland, of a “national literature” (26). Similarly, Garland argues that while America’s early literature, imitative of European art (the “crumbling idols” that he warns writers not to worship [124]), had little “national color,” writers eventually

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

149

“felt the influence of our mighty forests and prairies.” As the frontier disappeared and “men softened in speech and manner,” the way was prepared for local literature to become art (51), and, Garland observes, “local color means national character” (53). Countering Garland’s local color aesthetic, Mary Austin posits a view of national literature that privileges the contribution of Indigenous writers. In an unsigned 1919 American Indian Magazine article reproducing part of an Austin interview, Austin is quoted as noting the “distinct genus” of “Indian verse” and recalling how, in a 1903 lecture, she “predicted,” correctly, that American literature would eventually return to this free verse form. Like Garland, Austin also draws connections between literary forms and national character: “I believe we owe the Indian not only many elements in our art and language, but certain codes of behavior and ideals that had their part in developing American character” (“What Mary Austin Says About Indians” 181). Of course, Garland’s definitions of national literary form and character, which implicitly deny an Indigenous influence, have proved more culturally acceptable than Austin’s. Local writing will “redeem American literature,” Garland claims (Crumbling Idols, 59), and, perhaps more provocatively, it will redeem America: “[t]he physical conformation of our nation will change. It will lose its wildness, its austerity” (65). This statement not only suggests regional literature’s ability to affect a geographical change, but also a cultural change, responding to late-nineteenth-century concerns about the supposed “wildness” of Indigenous culture and supporting the assimilating and civilizing agendas of Indian education. Indeed, by the time he writes that “[t]o know Shakespeare is good. To know your fellow-men is better” (144), there seems little room for “fellow” American Indian writers in Garland’s national literary landscape.7 Contemporary critics observe similar connections between regionalism and nationalism.8 James Cox notes the problems created for all American writers by the issue of a national language and literature: “The nation was from the beginning and through its life but a dialect, a region, of the English language. . . . The difficult issue facing the American writer was the effort to make a national literature for a country without a native language, just as the chief difficulty for scholars and literary critics has been to distinguish between American and English literature” (762). Yet, Cox notes that such challenges served to unify American writers, for “however many dialects existed within the nation, from the perspective of England—an outside perspective—all writers were American” (763).9 Zitkala-Ša, as an American Indian woman in the early twentieth century, is excluded from such fraternal and national orders of citizenship. In fact, her region and native language are threatened by the acquisition of the English language and a formal education, and her

150

Gary Totten

narratives emphasize her alienation from these aspects of her life, as well as her sense of social exclusion from the dominant “American” culture. Narrating her boarding school experience and her tenure as a teacher at Carlisle Indian School, Zitkala-Ša emphasizes her feelings of alienation from others, first as a loneliness and despair through which even the presence of other American Indian students cannot penetrate, and finally as a profound sense of exclusion unbridgeable through mere intellectual and professional affinity with her colleagues. She emphasizes the alienating experiences of assimilationist ideology in her poem, “The Indian’s Awakening,” where she writes, “From you my own people, I’ve gone astray. / A wanderer now, with no where to stay” (lines 18–19), and also near the end of her third autobiographical essay, when, sitting alone in the “white-walled prison” of her room as an Indian teacher at an Indian school, she reflects that she has “made no friends among the race of people I loathed” (“Indian Teacher” 386). Through her individualized experience of loneliness, she invokes the ongoing devastation of first contact, registered by threats to land, language, and culture. Amy Kaplan argues that nineteenth-century texts envision nationalism by enacting “a willed amnesia about founding conflicts, while they reinvent multiple and contested pasts to claim as the shared origin of national identity” (242). Zitkala-Ša revives the memory of such conflicts by living and narrating the experience of exclusion and loss through her melancholy and thus conventionally disruptive autobiographical voice, revealing what Homi Bhabha refers to as the “cultural temporality” and “transitional social reality” of the nation, which disrupts the historical certainty of national origins (1). Criticism which designates her as a token American Indian regionalist relegates Zitkala-Ša to the status of a racial Other against whom to posit ideas of U.S. nationhood, rather than the anamnesis of Indigenous genocide and colonization, which constitute the repressed side of national history. It is simply easier for critics from the dominant culture to envelop her work in what Eric Sundquist terms local color’s “nostalgically charged” vision coinciding with the “nation’s inexorable drive toward cohesion and standardization” (509), than to confront the particular aspects and ongoing effects of the national history she illuminates and live with the cultural conscience she disturbs. Perhaps the greatest drawback of attempting to reconcile Zitkala-Ša’s work with dominant national history through a regionalist aesthetic is the way such an approach ignores issues of Indigenous nationalism. Current approaches to Zitkala-Ša’s work illustrate that our approach to regionalism, despite Foote’s arguments to the contrary (“The Cultural Work of American Regionalism” 40), still functions to sustain nationalistic agendas, and one way criticism has sustained such agendas is by ignoring the issue of tribal sovereignty in favor of other themes that align Zitkala-Ša with the tropes of mainstream regionalist writers. While Zitkala-Ša seldom addresses

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

151

Indigenous nationalism explicitly in her work, often preferring to think of American Indians as citizens within the larger United States, an important trajectory in her work during the first decades of the twentieth century anticipates a sentiment more closely resembling Indigenous nationalism. This particular strain in her writing marks an important aspect of her resistance to the nationalistic agendas of regionalist literary criticism and can be traced from her autobiographical writing to her later political texts. Resisting Regionalism To borrow a phrase from Donna Campbell, Zitkala-Ša “resists regionalism” and its nationalistic impulses by joining other American Indian writers who, as Cheryl Walker notes, grapple with the idea of Indigenous nationalism and a multicultural society before it was fashionable to do so (205), “contest the notion that the past had to take the shape it did,” and “imagine a nation (or multiple nations) committed to a policy of mutual accommodation” (40). While Zitkala-Ša’s texts often promote equality and citizenship within the larger United States, a concept that, as Mary Paniccia Carden notes, contradicts Indigenous notions of group identity (64), a form of Indigenous nationalism also evolves in her autobiographical and later political writings. Perhaps an emphasis on tribal sovereignty is less overt in her work because of an uncertainty among earlier American Indian writers, as Womack observes, “about whether a Native voice, a Native viewpoint, the narration of tribal life, or even a Native future was possible” (6). However, as Zitkala-Ša narrates her own experience of self-determination, she eventually arrives at a position where she can argue for her people’s right to self-determination and reimagine the relation between national histories and U.S. and Indigenous nationalisms. The first section of her autobiography epitomizes the freedom and selfdetermination she experiences on the plains, and she inculcates her “wild freedom and overflowing spirits,” qualities which are her “mother’s pride” (“Impressions” 37), into her sense of self. Zitkala-Ša is free to develop as an individual on the prairie through the respect she enjoys from her elders. Her mother’s reactions to her efforts and mistakes while learning beadwork make Zitkala-Ša “feel strongly responsible and dependent upon . . . [her] own judgment.” Her mother treats her “as a dignified little individual” (40). And when, in an attempt to honor the tribal custom of hospitality, Zitkala-Ša serves a visiting warrior a tepid mixture of muddy water and coffee grounds, both her mother and the warrior treat her “best judgment, poor as it was, with the utmost respect” (43). But even from within these scenes of self-development and selfdetermination, Zitkala-Ša invokes images that threaten personal and cultural freedom. In one instance, Zitkala-Ša reinterprets the meaning of westering

152

Gary Totten

and the freedoms of the frontier in the context of American Indian genocide and the loss of Indigenous lands. Her mother depicts the region in which they find themselves as the place to which they have been driven by the “bad paleface . . . a sickly sham” (37), who has taken away their lands and been instrumental in the deaths of Zitkala-Ša’s sister and uncle, both of whom died upon reaching the “western country” (38). By the time Zitkala-Ša writes of her experience, what Ward Churchill refers to as the “subjugation” of the West, begun around 1850, was well underway (338). Churchill argues that the campaign of extermination and “resettlement” waged against American Indians led to a loss of land and lives and an ensuing dispersal of Indigenous populations that is most accurately termed an American Indian diaspora (330–332). In addition to government-sanctioned action against Indigenous people, to which an 1894 Census Bureau report attributed a minimum of 45,000 deaths, there were a great deal more instances in which “Angloamerican citizens . . . kill[ed] Indians, often systematically, under a variety of quasi-official circumstances” (339). One such instance, related to Zitkala-Ša’s cultural history, occurred in the Dakota Territory capital of Yankton during the 1860s, where a two-hundred-dollar bounty was placed on Sioux scalps and General Alfred Sully arranged to have a pair of â•›Teton Sioux skulls put on display in the city (Lazarus 29). Zitkala-Ša herself specifically refers to Indigenous genocide in a 1923 article, “The California Indians of Today,” from the California Indian Herald, where she notes that the California Indians were reduced from “210,000 to 20,000 during the siege of seventy cruel winters, repeated evictions and the spread of the white man’s diseases among them” (10). In addition to genocide, the officially sanctioned taking of lands accomplished through the General Allotment Act of 1887, further threatened Indigenous culture and, as Churchill notes, “destroy[ed] what was left of basic indigenous socioeconomic cohesion” (341). Churchill notes that by 1930, allotment had reduced “native land holdings in the U.S. . . . from approximately 150 million acres to a little over 50 million” (342), and the paired programs of extermination and relocation negated Indigenous ability, physically and structurally, to sustain “any meaningful residue of national status” (340). Zitkala-Ša alludes to the debilitating effects of genocide and allotment on the tribal nation as she details allotment’s impact on individual lives in her 1921 story, “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” and in the autobiographical essays, where we find her and her mother living with the corruption of allotment and other instances of the exercise of federal plenary power over American Indians, a power “exercised in its most virulent and unabashed form” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (350), according to David Wilkins.10 In 1881, George Canfield argued that “an Indian is not a person within the meaning of the Constitution”(28) and used the idea of absolute federal plenary power to argue against tribal rights

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

153

and to defend Congress’ right to prevent American Indians from leaving a reservation, to deprive American Indians of “liberty,” “property,” and “life,” and to break treaties (33, 35). “[D]efrauded” of their lands and rights through the sort of process that Canfield describes, Zitkala-Ša and her mother reside in the provisional space of the Yankton Reservation, drawing water from rivers which her mother assumes the paleface will soon take away, as well (“Impressions” 37–38). In addition to the loss of land and rights essential to Indigenous culture and sovereignty, Zitkala-Ša’s autobiography indicates that federal Indian policy also erodes the cohesion of family ties. The Christian missionaries’ promise of red apples compels Zitkala-Ša to sever her ties with her mother and journey from West to East, literally from the tribal nation to the foreign nation of the United States, where, according to non-Indigenous wisdom, the saving and civilizing of the American Indian would be accomplished through education and assimilation in eastern boarding schools.11 Although she finds herself becoming increasingly estranged from her mother while she attends college, Zitkala-Ša still yearns for the West and its promise of nourishment through her mother’s love (“School Days” 193) and also, implicitly, the nourishment of land and tribal nation. Because her mother has still not forgiven her defiance, Zitkala-Ša uses her hands to produce Indian handicrafts which will hopefully earn her the “white man’s respect” (193) rather than using her hands to write letters to her mother, for which she claims she has no time, a choice which further alienates her from her culture and lands. Although she refuses to write to her mother, she uses her facility with the English language to reflect on the legacies of manifest destiny, and, ultimately, to win second place in an Earlham College oratorical contest. In this essay, “Side by Side” (published in The Earlhamite in 1896), Zitkala-Ša argues that the bad faith of early settlers and the vices of civilization have devastated her people in whose hearts patriotism is as keen a virtue as in the “Saxon” heart (178). In light of these developments, Zitkala-Ša wonders if “America’s first-born” has “forfeited his birthright” to America’s “boundless opportunities” (179), and she pleads with the country that has instituted a “successful system of Indian education” (179) to make room for her people. While Zitkala-Ša refers to opportunity and self-determination as an American Indian “birthright,” her conclusion anticipates the compromise of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech: “Seeking your skill in industry and in art, seeking labor and honest independence, . . . seeking by a new birthright to unite with yours our claim to a common country, seeking the Sovereign’s crown that we may stand side by side with you in ascribing royal honor to our nations’ flag” (179). Although such a passage explicitly works against the idea of an autonomous tribal nation and seeks a place for Indigenous peoples within the national borders of the United States, it is also an important early

154

Gary Totten

example of the ways in which Zitkala-Ša uses her facility with the English language to resist dominant culture through her insistence on equal access to the privileges of U.S. national culture for Indigenous peoples. In her later autobiographical narratives and political writing, Zitkala-Ša ultimately resists the compromise implicit in her “Side by Side” speech and the nationalist paradigm that excludes American Indians. Indeed, she further complicates the U.S. nationalist paradigm as the third installment of her autobiography begins. She sends a message to her mother in the West, telling of her plans to teach in an eastern Indian school (Carlisle), further distancing herself from the region in which she lived as a girl. Her superiors eventually send her West, turning her “loose to pasture” to recruit Indian pupils for the school (“Indian Teacher” 383) and, in essence, convince others like herself to relinquish their freedom, disrupting her own as well as dominant interpretations of the western frontier. But not only has she lost the West, the East also holds little hope for her success. The useless eastern education of her brother, Dawée (384), and the failure of his experience cause her to exclaim, “The Great Spirit does not care if we live or die!” (385). She recognizes that eastern education for the Indian “included [white] self-preservation quite as much as Indian education” (385), and she ends her autobiography with the disturbing realization that the docility and industriousness of the Indian students is comforting for the white visitors to Indian schools because it confirms their project of cultural preservation (386). By remembering her mother’s stories of the “encroaching frontier settlers” (“Indian Teacher” 386) and by resisting the white-preservationist gaze of those favoring Indian education, in the final installment of her autobiography, Zitkala-Ša ultimately resists the designs of U.S. nationalism.12 However, to reach this conclusion, she has given up nature for the “white man’s papers” and has become a “cold bare pole . . . planted in a strange earth” (386), dispossessed of the western lands of her youth and opposed to the ideologies of the East.13 Zitkala-Ša is critical of dominant paradigms in “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” ↜but her tone is dispirited and the events related in the installment end on a negative note with her estrangement from land and culture. In Old Indian Legends, however, she finds a critical space and place from which she can more positively resist conventional narratives of U.S. nationalism and literary criticism. Within a regionalist framework, Fetterley and Pryse suggest that Zitkala-Ša’s “desire to tell Indian legends and stories in an Indian voice, demonstrat[es] . . . the impulse shared by regionalist writers to shift the center of perception to the native speaker” (534). However, given Zitkala-Ša’s relationship to issues of Indigenous language, English, and cultural genocide, the American Indian speaker in her stories occupies quite a different position than the Native speaker of the white regionalist

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

155

text. Sharing the legends of the oral tradition in writing (and in English) is obviously an act of translation into a non-Indigenous form, but these legends still represent, as Karen Kilcup maintains, a cultural perception, a communal worldview and a desire to transmit American Indian values (295) rather than a deliberately regionalist strategy to “shift” narrative perspective to a Native speaker, as Fetterley and Pryse suggest. In the preface to Old Indian Legends, Zitkala-Ša acknowledges the communal nature of these stories and their retelling within an Indigenous context: “Under an open sky, nestling close to the earth, the old Dakota story-tellers have told me these legends. In both Dakotas, North and South, I have often listened to the same story told over again by a new story-teller” (v). Responding to and envisioning past and future critics who worry over America’s lack of a native language, she states that she has “tried to transplant the native spirit of these tales . . . into the English language, since America in the last few centuries has acquired a second tongue” (vi). In what could be seen as a deliberate undermining of her boarding school education, Zitkala-Ša asserts the primacy of Indigenous language and stories by casting English as the nation’s second language and entertains alternative visions of nationhood accomplished through a multicultural society by claiming that “[t]he old legends of America belong quite as much to the blue-eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine” (vi).14 Placing her retelling of these legends in a regionalist context reinscribes her within a national narrative that has excluded Indigenous writers and texts for purposes of self-definition, or sought, as Amy Kaplan notes, “‘others’ against which to imagine American nationhood” (242). Clearly, Zitkala-Ša’s retelling of these legends resists such appropriative strategies. Zitkala-Ša achieves a similar form of resistance in her essay, “Why I Am a Pagan.” Sidonie Smith wants to read Zitkala-Ša’s return to the reservation in “Why I Am a Pagan,” not as a return to a “disempowered place” (Smith 137), but as a place from which she “turns cultural literacy into cultural critique” (137). I prefer to think of her strategy as a resistance to and even reinvention of nationalist narratives rather than a critique. In “Why I Am a Pagan” she invokes the stories of Old Indian Legends and resists the authority of the dominant culture’s narratives by celebrating the natural world of the “Stone-Boy” (802) legends and the unity of all “God’s creatures” (803). She refers to herself as “a wee child” (803) in nature’s wonderland, reverting back to the images of freedom and individuality that characterize the first section of the autobiography. By reintroducing the idyllic childhood experiences of the autobiography, she counters the effects of her boarding school experience while, through the contrast between these idyllic scenes and the horrors of the boarding school, she emphasizes a cultural oppression that lies well outside white experience and white texts, revealing the ways in which she uses the autobiography and an essay such as “Why I Am a Pagan” to write against

156

Gary Totten

the colonizing discourses of assimilation and genocide, narrating a reality inconsistent with the community building and preservation of the dominant culture celebrated in white regionalist texts, and creating in the autobiography of her boarding school experience what Shari M. Huhndorf refers to as a “reverse captivity narrative” (189 n. 39). Zitkala-Ša continues this resistance in her later political writings, many of which appeared in American Indian Magazine, where she worked on the editorial board (1916–1918), as editor of the journal (1918–1920), and as secretary-treasurer of the magazine’s sponsoring society, the Society of American Indians. This resistance takes a surprising form through ZitkalaŠa’s insistence that American Indians learn English. Although this position opposes her earlier strategy to resist the motives of Indian education and characterize English as the nation’s second language and contradicts the idea that English alienates her from her people, Zitkala-Ša uses English as another way to resist U.S. nationalism.15 An early example of her intention to use English as a tool of resistance appears in “School Days” when she notes that after learning some English, she is “possessed” by a “mischievous spirit of revenge” (188), but her clearest statement on the importance of English to American Indians appears later in “Letter to the Chiefs and Headmen of the Tribes” (1919) to which she appends a footnote asking readers who understand English to “do a kind act by reading and explaining it to an Indian who cannot read or speak English” (196). She suggests that if it is important for new (white) immigrants to learn English, then it is “even more worth our while to renew our efforts to speak English” (197). While the white emphasis on teaching immigrants English was partly designed to quell fears about the supposed threat immigrants posed to the American way of life and fulfill assimilative desires, Zitkala-Ša uses the idea to promote the preservation and self-determination of Indigenous culture. In her 1901 story, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” she raises the question of what assimilation and white education cost Indigenous peoples, but in her “Letter to the Chiefs and Headmen of the Tribes,” she suggests that Indigenous solidarity will result from the ability to communicate with one another in English: “I could . . . profit by your advice in many things, and you would know you were not forgot” (197). In “Heart to Heart Talk” (1924), from the California Indian Herald, she further emphasizes the need to “think and act together” and, thus, without the interference of outside voices or agencies, “organize and work together in one powerful unit” (3). English facilitates this project of self-determination. She also ties the learning of English to the retaining of American Indian lands, an integral component of Indigenous self-determination. In the “Letter to the Chiefs and Headmen of the Tribes,” she expresses concern about the rate at which American Indians are selling their inherited lands,

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

157

writing, “though we may become educated in the White man’s way and even acquire money, we cannot really be happy unless we have a small piece of this Out-of-Doors to enjoy as we please. For the sake of our children’s children we must hold onto a few acres” (197). That she considers English-speaking and the retaining of Indian lands the two most important issues she could discuss with her people also alludes to the ways in which white America used the inability of some American Indians to communicate in English as a way to gain possession of Indian lands. Clearly, Zitkala-Ša uses English, a “tool” of the dominant culture to, as Carden suggests, make it “visible as [one of the] tools” (73) used to oppress Indigenous peoples and then turn it into a tool of resistance. Indeed, she petitions F. P. Keppell, Third Assistant Secretary of War, in a letter published in the Autumn 1918 American Indian Magazine, to keep the Carlisle Indian School from being turned back into military facilities because of the government’s “honor bound obligation to educate the Indian” and the “loss of educational opportunities [for American Indian children] only Carlisle can give” (“Secretary’s Report in Brief ” 123). Despite Zitkala-Ša’s own negative experiences as a student in the boarding school system and as a teacher at Carlisle, when considered in relation to “Letter to the Chiefs and Headmen of the Tribes,” her earlier argument that the loss of Indian land will negatively affect the “future children of our race” (197) implies that education and learning English offers a way to preserve and protect Indigenous lands and a distinct culture, a way to resist a dominant national future and maintain the integrity of an Indigenous future. In fact, she suggests in her letter to Keppell that the education of American Indians, and all that it entails for an Indigenous future, is implicitly more important than the military uses to which Carlisle could be put to win the war. However, Zitkala-Ša also utilizes the war, particularly American Indian participation in World War I, and patriotism as tools of resistance. American Indian patriotism is not rewarded, as it should be, with full enfranchisement, as her 1917 poem, “The Red Man’s America,” reveals: My country! ’tis to thee, My pleas I bring. Land where our fathers died, Whose offspring are denied The Franchise given wide, Hark, while I sing. (lines 1–7)

In a 1919 article, “America, Home of the Red Man,” she expresses similar sentiments as she relates her encounter with a fellow traveler en route to Pierre, South Dakota, who, noticing a pin Zitkala-Ša is wearing, asks her if she has a family member in the war. When Zitkala-Ša answers that her

158

Gary Totten

husband, “a member of the great Sioux Nation, . . . is a volunteer in Uncle Sam’s Army” (165), the stranger replies, “Oh! Yes! You are an Indian! Well, I knew when I first saw you that you must be a foreigner” (165). ZitkalaŠa reacts against this insinuation of outsider status by musing to herself, as she does in other pieces such as “The Secretary’s Report in Brief,” her “Editorial Comment” in the Autumn 1918 and Summer 1919 issues, and “Indian Gifts to Civilized Man,” that the American Indian is as fiercely patriotic and committed to the cause of democracy as any other group, despite being denied the privilege of U.S. citizenship. At the same time, she also emphasizes American Indians’ problematic relationship to the ideals of U.S. democracy by noting that “The Red Man of America loves democracy and hates mutilated treaties” (“America, Home of the Red Man” 165). “As America has declared democracy abroad, so must we consistently practise [sic] it at home,” she notes in Autumn 1918, for if the American Indian “is good enough to fight for American ideals he is good enough for American citizenship now” (“Editorial Comment” 114). In “America, Home of the Red Man,” a procession of images illustrating the injustices of disenfranchisement flash into her mind, including an aged grandmother who donated most of her life savings to the Red Cross, relief efforts undertaken by American Indian women to provide moccasins for French orphans, and a Senate resolution, introduced by an American Indian senator, to make Indian funds in the U.S. Treasury available to the war effort (166). To the white traveler in South Dakota, she points out recent articles that challenge the perceived outsider status of American Indians (167). Although the essay is ostensibly a conversation between her and the man she meets while traveling, her efforts to educate the white traveler serve as a model, reminding American Indians of the political imperative to correct misconceptions about Indigenous peoples. Indeed, less than a year earlier, in her “Secretary’s Report in Brief,” she notes that it is the duty of the Society of American Indians to “convey its intimate knowledge of Indian matters to the American public,” the group ultimately “responsible for the final fulfillment of government treaties with Indians” (122). Zitkala-Ša clearly recognizes the connection between a positive future for American Indians and their ability to take control of how they are represented in popular culture. Sometimes couched within popular stereotypes, these ideas serve as further examples of her ability to, as Carden notes, “rewrite narratives of assimilation” (64). In “Indian Gifts to Civilized Man” (1918), she notes that American Indian soldiers, “[b]eing . . . so much at home in the out-of-doors, . . . may be an invaluable guide to our boys born and bred indoors” (116), a perspective which seems to coincide with the nineteenthcentury ideology of the noble savage. She also notes that American Indian soldiers may gain as much or more “practical white man’s knowledge from

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

159

first hand experience” with white soldiers than from book learning (116). While these statements appear to place Indigenous soldiers in an inferior position, the passage is better understood in relation to Zitkala-Ša’s assertion of American Indian identity and other rhetorical acts which overturn narratives of assimilation, such as her privileging of “the gift of individual consciousness” (as celebrated in her poem, “An Indian Praying on the Hilltop” [line 1] and implied in her essay “Why I Am a Pagan”) and the courage to think for oneself, which, along with living on the reservation, she notes in her Summer 1919 editorial, may contribute as much to the definition of heroism as dying in battle (62). The notion of taking such a stand, indeed, to stand on one’s own feet, makes an early appearance in “School Days,” when she is insulted as a white woman tosses her in the air and wishes the woman would “let [her] . . . stand on [her] . . . own feet” (186). In her Spring 1919 editorial, Zitkala-Ša connects the idea of standing on one’s feet to specific political action and argues that the Sioux Nation (a term she does not generally use) must procure its own legal counsel in the legislative battle for the Black Hills (6), a stance which clearly resists government paternalism and the agenda of the Indian Bureau and privileges Indigenous self-determination. In her Summer 1919 “Editorial Comment” she reminds readers about the early Europeans’ desire for self-determination as they “fled from the autocracy of Europe to the open arms of the Red Man” (63). It is the American Indian who now desires the same self-determination, she observes in her 1921 pamphlet, Americanize the First American: A Plan of Regeneration: “Give [the American Indian] . . . those educational advantages pressed with so much enthusiasm upon the foreigner[, such as] . . . freedom to do their own thinking; to exercise their judgment; to hold open forums for the expression of their thought, and . . . to manage their own personal business” (4, 6). In “Indian Gifts to Civilized Man” and “Letter to the Chiefs and Headmen of the Tribes” she refers to another version of standing on one’s feet when, through her insistence on the importance of the “out-of-doors” to Indigenous peoples, she again emphasizes the cultural necessity of retaining Indigenous lands, bringing her argument back to the connection between self-determination and land rights in the context of the contributions of American Indian soldiers, through and against the notion of the noble savage. One of Zitkala-Ša’s most compelling statements on tribal sovereignty, however, appears in her 1919 article, “The Coronation of Chief Powhatan Retold,” in which she invokes narratives and histories of first contact. While in her earlier autobiographical work, she often expresses self-determination in terms of her individual experience and identity, even, as Dexter Fisher notes of her renaming and writing of self, “creating her own name and essentially her own oral history” (231), her discussion of Powhatan’s reaction to colonization engages Indigenous sovereignty on a larger scale. Zitkala-

160

Gary Totten

Ša begins the article by reversing the narratives of first contact. She notes the “remarkable coincidence” in the fact that the first lady, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, a “lineal descendant of Pocahontas,” and her husband are so well received by Europe’s royal families prior to the world Peace Conference, given that Pocahontas, “[s]pringing from the tribal democracies of the new world . . . was the first emissary of democratic ideas to cast-ridden Europe” when she was received by the King and Queen of England (179). By figuring Indigenous peoples as the originators of democratic ideals, Zitkala-Ša is also able to rewrite the meaning of Powhatan’s encounter with colonizers. The colonizers considered Powhatan to be “whimsical . . . because he was more interested in trifling trinkets and bright colored beads which appealed more to the artistic eye of the aborigine” (180) than the royal crown, sent as a gift from King James I (179). Powhatan was “grossly ignorant of the world’s rank and power associated with particular pieces of the white man’s articles of dress and decoration,” Zitkala-Ša writes (180), illustrating Taiaiake Alfred’s argument about the incompatibility of Indigenous and “dominant Western” paradigms of sovereignty (58–59). Zitkala-Ša emphasizes the difference between Indigenous and European definitions of power and symbol and, in an Indigenous context, the problematic relationship between kingly symbols of sovereignty and the struggle for Indigenous lands. She observes that pondering white incursions into Indian territory might have led Powhatan to “question the real significance of these King’s garments and crown. To the liberty loving soul of Powhatan, this royal camouflage was no comparison to the gorgeous array of Autumn in that primeval forest where he roamed at will” (180), a passage that again suggests the image of the noble savage, but which, as we have come to expect, Zitkala-Ša is able to wield in her resistance to dominant paradigms. Although Powhatan eventually permits himself to be “dragged into” the king’s garments for a coronation ceremony, “[a]fter hours of reassurance that the . . . garments would not injure him,” he refuses to kneel before the colonizers to be crowned and reacts with anger and surprise to a royal musket salute (180). Powhatan’s suspicion of the European symbols of sovereignty, his resistance to colonial authority, and the fact that the colonizers must resort to trickery to make him kneel (leaning “hard upon his shoulder to make him stoop a little” [180]) allude to the vexed histories of national origins and the ongoing devastation of first contact. While the “royal camouflage” of the colonizers is inferior to the “gorgeous array of Autumn” and Indigenous democracies are precursory to European versions, the larger significance of the colonizer’s trickery, as it relates to Indigenous land and sovereignty, is obviously apparent to Zitkala-Ša, making the retelling of Powhatan’s coronation both an empowering narrative for Indigenous peoples and an ominous reminder of ongoing threats to Indigenous sovereignty.

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

161

Nations, Narratives, and Critical Traditions By resisting both U.S. nationalism and literary regionalism, Zitkala-Ša uncovers the contradictions of both dominant American culture and American literary criticism. Demonstrating regionalism’s problematic relationship with national identity, Philip Fisher argues that “[c]ultural life in America swings like a pendulum between a diversity of sectional voices and an ever-new project of [national] unity . . . and each rewon unity involves not a return to a lost identity but a new plane of association (241). Although Fisher’s argument ignores Indigenous concerns, the passage is helpful for emphasizing how a clearer sense of this “new plane of association” must prevail between traditional critical assumptions and Indigenous texts. Unfortunately, as Philip Fisher points out, “[r]egionalism is always, in America, part of a struggle within representation. It is seldom or never a matter of tolerance” (243). This struggle within representation plays itself out in Zitkala-Ša’s appropriation into regionalist studies, where critics exercise the license that Katherine Shanley warns against by “creating metaphors from living Native American traditions,” “speaking for American Indians,” and claiming “more power for literature than it deserves” (“Metacritical Frames” 225–226). We should not expect, Shanley continues, that the “end result will bring us into ‘one mind,’” but rather hope for “productive and respectful exchanges” (226), or, as Catherine Rainwater suggests, recognize the “counter-colonial” and “reappropriative” strategies of Indigenous texts that aim for changes in “a reader’s habits of interpretation” (30–31). Critics must learn to read the resistance to regionalism in Zitkala-Ša’s texts, to see how her narratives work against the cultural nostalgia and national forgetfulness through which Indigenous texts are incorporated into a regionalist and nationalist discourse that ignores Indigenous sovereignty. Destabilizing such discourses and revising sentiments such as those expressed in 1896 that American Indians wish to “stand side by side” with other Americans “in ascribing royal honor to our nation’s flag” (“Side by Side” 179), Zitkala-Ša rewrites the final paragraph of “Why I Am a Pagan” and retitles the essay “The Great Spirit” for inclusion in American Indian Stories in 1921. In her revision, she creates what Roumiana Velikova calls an “eclectic poetic abstraction” (61) by catching the “spangles” and “stars” of the American flag in the fringes of the Great Spirit’s “royal mantle” (American Indian Stories 107). She performs a similar feat in her essay on Powhatan when she traces the first lady’s lineage (and the presidency’s and country’s democratic ideas) to Pocahontas, and in her speech “A Dacotah Ode to Washington,” presented at the Washington Monument on June 22, 1922, where she celebrates the memory of Washington, “who disdained kingship . . . and preferred to be a servant of the people[,] . . . [and] over all his glorious achievements upheld our sacred emblem, the eagle, pointing to its meaning in all his noble acts” (Cong.

162

Gary Totten

Rec. 12162). Although one could argue that these images represent ZitkalaŠa’s continuing desire for a unified U.S. nation that includes American Indians through the compromise implicit in her Earlham essay, thus absorbing American Indian identity into a dominant American identity and threatening Indigenous sovereignty, they actually function as tools of resistance. Because the symbols of the American flag are caught in the fringes of the Great Spirit’s mantle (rather than vice versa), because Pocahontas and Indigenous democracies predate the founding of the United States, and because the eagle is an Indigenous symbol before and even during its function as a national U.S. symbol, these images also manage to establish, in Philip Fisher’s words, a “new plane of association” between nations, narratives, and critical traditions by challenging conventional notions of nationhood and preparing the way for later Indigenous texts that will further challenge dominant theories and practices of nationalism.16 Zitkala-Ša constructs a complex and challenging cultural and national landscape and her texts demand a critical discourse that seeks not to fulfill the needs of dominant U.S. culture and criticism, but responds appropriately to aesthetic, cultural, and national difference.

No t e s 1. Kate McCullough’s Regions of Identity exemplifies literary criticism that responsibly engages otherness. Although she does not include American Indian writers in her analysis, she suggests that critics can comprehend the “complications and nuances of discourses of national identity” by approaching such discourses “from the perspectives of writers variously situated, considering the different ways in which their representations of region and nation are specifically inflected in relation to specific categories of otherness” (6). 2. In Toward a Native American Critical Theory, Elvira Pulitano outlines the critical approaches adopted by Indigenous writers and critics: Paula Gunn Allen’s woman-centered perspective, Robert Allen Warrior and Craig Womack’s emphasis on Indigenous intellectual sovereignty, Greg Sarris and Louis Owens’s dialogism, and Gerald Vizenor’s focus on liberation and survivance through a hermeneutics of the trickster. 3. The issue of Indigenous sovereignty has been debated by various critics. Taiaiake Alfred argues that “sovereignty is an exclusionary concept rooted in an adversarial and coercive Western notion of power” (59); thus, to argue for “indigenous nationhood” using the non-Indigenous concept of sovereignty is “self-defeating” (58), and an “[a]cceptance of ‘Aboriginal rights’ in the context of state sovereignty represents the culmination of white society’s efforts to assimilate indigenous peoples” (59). Menno Boldt and Tony Long contend that “adopting the European-Western ideology of sovereignty” “legitimiz[es]” its “associated hierarchy” and “constitutes a complete rupture with traditional indigenous principles” (548). However, Vine Deloria Jr. argues that restricting sovereignty to its “legal-political context” is “limiting” because it retains the adversarial meanings of the term (124). While the term initially referred to the “absolute power of a nation to determine its own course of action with respect to other nations” (118) and “originated as a means of locating

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

163

the seat of political power in European nations,” Deloria contends that “it has assumed the aspect of continuing cultural and communal integrity when transferred to the North American setting” (122). Deloria insists that sovereignty involves this “continued cultural integrity” rather than “political powers” for American Indians, and “to the degree that a nation loses its sense of cultural identity, to that degree it suffers a loss of sovereignty” (123). Deloria looks to the Indian community to assert Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination rather than to congressional law, and argues that “[a] self-disciplined community that holds itself together and acts with a unified vision possesses sufficient sovereignty to confront and resolve any difficulty” (123). See David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima’s Uneven Ground for an accessible legal overview of Indigenous sovereignty. 4. Many scholars have expressed opinions on the issue of non-Indigenous critics researching, teaching, and writing about American Indian literatures. While Womack and Cook-Lynn, among others, claim that non-Indigenous criticism of American Indian texts perpetuates the colonization of Indigenous peoples, others, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, argue for the critical participation of non-Indigenous scholars. As a non-Indigenous scholar Arnold Krupat insists, a “double bind” exists when non-Indigenous scholars are criticized for not including Indigenous works in their teaching and scholarship and accused of “colonial appropriation” when they do include such works (Turn to the Native 11). Duane Champagne argues that “[a]n open and free forum for discussion among Indian and non-Indian scholars benefits everyone who seeks to produce accurate, substantial, and significant studies of Indian peoples” (181). Wendy Rose notes that white critics “have as much prerogative” to speak about Indigenous cultures as American Indians have to speak about white culture. “The question is,” Rose continues, “how this is done and, to some extent, why it is done. . . . Many non-Indian people have—from the stated perspective of the non-native viewing things native—written honestly and eloquently about any number of Indian topics” (416). Rose’s remarks emphasize the need for non-Indigenous critics to explicitly situate themselves and their perspectives outside Indigenous culture and not attempt, as William Young notes, “to pass off their work as authentic representations” of Indigenous culture and traditions (3). As a non-Indigenous scholar, I write out of respect for and interest in Indigenous literature and culture and, as this article’s topic reveals, seek ways to more responsibly read and interpret Indigenous works. See Devon Mihesuah’s introduction to Natives and Academics for a discussion of various perspectives that have been expressed on the subject. 5. In her 1932 essay, “Regionalism in American Fiction,” Mary Austin makes a similar claim about the links between geography and American Indian identity: “everything an Indian does or thinks is patterned by the particular parcel of land which is his tribal home” (104). Austin maintains that land exerts more influence than race in people’s lives. See Noreen Groover Lape’s essay, “‘There Was a Part for Her in the Indian Life,’” for a discussion of the problematic nature of Austin’s perspective. 6. Patricia Okker observes the same effect when the narrator of Zitkala-Ša’s “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” is read against conventional elements of naturalist fiction. As Okker argues, while readers are able to remain emotionally detached from the inevitable death of Old Koskoosh in Jack London’s “The Law of Life” because he conforms to the “stereotype of the dying and stoic Indian,” Zitkala-Ša overturns naturalistic conventions by explaining the death of the narrator and his father

164

Gary Totten

“as a result of white greed and imperialism” (93) and by portraying the narrator’s “emotional detachment from his own fate as a sign of cultural displacement . . . while demanding the reader’s own emotional involvement” (94). Okker suggests that the story’s “critical neglect” may be a result of its failure to sustain popular romanticized Indian stereotypes (93). ╇ 7. Garland does, however, portray American Indians in a somewhat sympathetic light in his 1923 text, The Book of the American Indian. These stories, written between 1890 and 1905, are based on Garland’s firsthand observations of reservation life and interviews with American Indians. Although the stories sustain the stereotypes we might expect of a white writer in the nineteenth century, Garland also, as Keith Newlin notes, “respects Native Americans as people with developed cultures that ought to be preserved and protected from exploitation and racial eradication” (xlv). Newlin suggests that Garland’s “considerable compassion for others ‘less advanced,’” his attempts to use his writing to “make conditions better for all people,” and his own “intimate acquaintance” with Indigenous peoples, “separates his fiction from that of other white writers, who tended to demonize the Indians” (xii–xiii). ╇ 8. In “‘Not in the Least American,’” Fetterley argues from a gender studies standpoint that women’s regionalist writing has been marginalized because of its un-American nature, but does not pursue the connections between race and nationalism. ╇ 9. Mary Austin counters this idea, somewhat, when she suggests in 1932 that a “genuine regionalism” would present “not one vast, pale figure of America, but several Americas, in many subtle and significant characterizations” (98). However, her focus on the importance of geography to literary regionalism allows her to assume that language, culture, or politics exert much less force on literary production. Responding to critics who characterize regionalism as a new and surprising development in American literature, Austin observes that “[t]he really astonishing thing would have been to find the American people as a whole resisting the influence of natural environment in favor of the lesser influences of a shared language and a common political arrangement” (98, emphasis added). The work of Indigenous writers indicates that language and politics exert much more influence on literature than Austin realizes. 10. Wilkins defines “absolute” federal plenary power as “power which is not limited by other textual constitutional provisions” and is “unlimited regarding congressional objectives” (355). When Congress exercises federal plenary power “as the voice of the federal government in its relation with tribes, and is acting with the consent of the tribal people involved, it is exercising legitimate authority,” according to Wilkins (355). 11. See also Susan Bernardin’s discussion of the connections between sentimental ideology and the meaning of the American West in Zitkala-Ša’s texts in “The Lessons of a Sentimental Education.” 12. Ruth Spack similarly notes how Zitkala-Ša reinvents the field of anthropology by subjecting the visitors to the Indian school to the scientific and disinterested scrutiny that anthropologists have always directed toward Indigenous people (25). 13. Meisenheimer suggests that we read the “cold bare pole” more positively as a reference to the Sun Dance pole, “the center of spiritual power in Dakota

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

165

ceremony” (118) and, thus, symbolizing Zitkala-Ša as “firmly rooted in the very center of Dakota culture” (119). 14. For further discussion of how Zitkala-Ša uses rhetorical strategies to resist narratives of Indian education, see Jessica Enoch’s “Resisting the Script of Indian Education.” 15. Hafen suggests that Zitkala-Ša “invok[es] the very constructs she critiques as an impetus for reform and moral conduct” (“Sentimentality and Sovereignty” 31). Carden notes that Zitkala-Ša’s mother uses a similar strategy, which reveals her awareness that American Indians can utilize “the master’s tools,” including language and education, to challenge dominant culture, even as she recognizes how white ways “erod[e] the ground of ‘real Dakota’ identity” (65). Carden observes in her analysis of the autobiographical essays how Zitkala-Ša uses language “to critique [the master’s] . . . coercive system, while simultaneously acknowledging that she has been marked into the text of his dominance by the apparatus designed to produce compliant colonial subjects” (66). Cathy Davidson and Ada Norris add that “[w]hether or not . . . we agree with Zitkala-Ša’s choice[s], many of which, from a contemporary view, seem politically incorrect, what is clear is that she made [these choices] . . . with political consciousness” (xxiii–xxiv). 16. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn suggests that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, despite failing to “take into account the specific kind of tribal/nation status of the original occupants of this continent” (“American Fiction Writer” 34) because of its Panindian focus on history, is (in 1993) the “foremost Indian novel in which we see the clear and unmistakable attempt to describe Indian Nationalism in modern terms” (33).

Wor k s Ci t e d Alfred, Taiaiake. Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 1999. Allen, Paula Gunn. “‘Border’ Studies: The Intersection of Gender and Color.” In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, edited by Joseph Gibaldi, 303–319. New York: MLA, 1992. Ammons, Elizabeth. “Expanding the Canon of American Realism.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, edited by Donald Pizer, 95–114. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Austin, Mary. “Regionalism in American Fiction.” English Journal 21 (1932): 97–107. Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Bernardin, Susan. “The Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Narratives.” Western American Literature 32, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 212–238. Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative).” Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 11–28. Bhabha, Homi, ed. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation.” Nation and Narration, 1–7. New York: Routledge, 1990. Boldt, Menno, and Tony Long. “Tribal Traditions and European Political Ideologies: The Dilemma for Canada’s Native Indians.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 17 (1984): 537–553. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha, 44–70. New York: Routledge, 1990.

166

Gary Totten

Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Campbell, Donna. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885– 1915. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997. Canfield, George F. “The Legal Position of the Indian.” The American Law Review 15 (╆January 1881): 21–37. Carden, Mary Paniccia. “‘The Ears of the Palefaces Could Not Hear Me’: Languages of Self-Representation in Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Essays.” Prose Studies 20, no. 1 (April 1997): 58–76. Cary, Elisabeth Luther. “Recent Writings by American Indians.” The Book Buyer: A Monthly Review of American Literature (February 1902): 21–25. Champagne, Duane. “American Indian Studies is for Everyone.” In Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah, 181–189. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Churchill, Ward. Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization. Winnipeg, Man.: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 1999. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “The American Indian Fiction Writer: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty.” Wicazo Sa Review 9, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 26–36. ——— . “How Scholarship Defames the Native Voice . . . and Why.” Wicazo Sa Review 15, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 79–92. Cox, James M. “Regionalism: A Diminished Thing.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott, 761–784. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Crow, Charles L., ed. Introduction. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, 1–4. Malden Mass.: Blackwell, 2003. Cutter, Martha. “Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Writings: The Problems of a Canonical Search for Language and Identity.” melus 19, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 31–44. Davidson, Cathy N., and Ada Norris, eds. Introduction. Zitkala-Ša: American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, by Zitkala-Ša, xi–xxxv. New York: Penguin, 2003. Davis, Cynthia J. “Making the Strange(r) Familiar: Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘The Foreigner.’” In Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie A. Innes and Diana Royer, 88–108. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Deloria, Vine, Jr. “Self-Determination and the Concept of Sovereignty.” In Native American Sovereignty, edited by John R. Wunder, 118–124. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. Diana, Vanessa Holford. “‘Hanging in the Heart of Chaos’: Bi-Cultural Limbo, Self(Re)presentation, and the White Audience in Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories.” Cimarron Review 121 (October 1, 1997): 154–173. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” 1837. Nature; Addresses and Lectures, 49–70. Boston: J. Munroe, 1849. Enoch, Jessica. “Resisting the Script of Indian Education: Zitkala-Ša and the Carlisle Indian School.” College English 65, no. 2 (November 2002): 117–141. Fetterley, Judith. “‘Not in the Least American’: Nineteenth-Century Literary Regionalism as UnAmerican Literature.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, edited by Karen L. Kilcup, 15–32. Malden Mass.: Blackwell, 1998. ——— , and Marjorie Pryse, eds. American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910. New York: Norton, 1992.

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

167

Fisher, Dexter. “Zitkala-Ša: The Evolution of a Writer.” American Indian Quarterly 5, no. 3 (August 1979): 229–238. Fisher, Philip. “American Literary and Cultural Studies Since the Civil War.” In Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, 232–250. New York: mla, 1992. Foote, Stephanie. “The Cultural Work of American Regionalism.” In A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, edited by Charles L. Crow, 25–41. Malden ma: Blackwell, 2003. ——— . Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Garland, Hamlin. The Book of the American Indian, edited by Keith Newlin. 1923; reprint, Acton Mass.: Copley, 2002. ——— . Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly With Literature, Painting and the Drama, edited by Jane Johnson. 1894; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Hafen, P. Jane, ed. Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera, by Zitkala-Ša. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. ——— . “Indigenous Peoples and Place.” In A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, edited by Charles L. Crow, 154–170. Malden ma: Blackwell, 2003. ——— . “Zitkala-Ša: Sentimentality and Sovereignty.” Wicazo Sa Review 12, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 31–42. Howells, W. D. “Editor’s Study.” Harper’s Monthly 83 (November 1891): 962–966. Huhndorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Inness, Sherrie A., and Diana Royer, eds. Introduction. Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regionalist Writing, 1–16. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Jahner, Elaine. “A Critical Approach to American Indian Literature.” In Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, edited by Paula Gunn Allen, 211–224. New York: mla, 1983. ——— . “Metalanguages.” In Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 155–185. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Kaplan, Amy. “Nation, Region, and Empire.” In Columbia History of the American Novel, edited by Emory Elliott, 240–266. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Kilcup, Karen L. “Zitkala-Ša.” In Native American Women’s Writing, c. 1800–1924: An Anthology, 294–295. Oxford U.K.: Blackwell, 2000. Krupat, Arnold. The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ——— . The Voice in the Margins: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Lape, Noreen Groover. “‘There Was a Part for Her in the Indian Life’: Mary Austin, Regionalism, and the Problems of Appropriation.” In Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie A. Innes and Diana Royer, 124–139. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Lazarus, Edward. Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. McCullough, Kate. Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885– 1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

168

Gary Totten

Meisenheimer, D. K., Jr. “Regionalist Bodies/Embodied Regions: Sarah Orne Jewett and Zitkala-Ša.” In Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie A. Innes and Diana Royer, 109–123. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Mihesuah, Devon A., ed. Introduction. Natives and Americans: Researching and Writing About American Indians, 1–22. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Mooney, James. “Our Last Cannibal Tribe.” Harper’s Monthly 103 (September 1901): 550–555. “New Figures in Literature and Art.” Atlantic Monthly 76 (December 1895): 840–844. Newlin, Keith. Introduction. The Book of the American Indian, by Hamlin Garland, xi–xlvi. Acton Mass.: Copley, 2002. Okker, Patricia. “Native American Literatures and the Canon: The Case of Zitkala-Ša.” In American Realism and the Canon, edited by Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, 87–101. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Pulitano, Elvira. Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Rainwater, Catherine. Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Rose, Wendy. “The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on Whiteshamanism.” In The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 403–421. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Shanley, Kathryn. “‘Born from the Need to Say’: Boundaries and Sovereignties in Native American Literary and Cultural Studies.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 15 (2001): 3–16. ——— . “Metacritical Frames of Reference in Studying American Indian Literature: An Afterword.” In Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations, edited by Gretchen M. Bataille, 224–226. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Smith, Sidonie. “Cheesecake, Nymphs, and ‘We the People’: Un/National Subjects About 1900.” Prose Studies 17, no. 1 (April 1994): 120–140. Sollors, Werner. “Introduction: The Invention of Ethnicity.” In The Invention of Ethnicity, edited by Werner Sollors, ix–xx. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Spack, Ruth. “Re-visioning Sioux Women: Zitkala-Ša’s Revolutionary American Indian Stories.” Legacy 14, no. 1 (1997): 25–42. Sundquist, Eric. “Realism and Regionalism.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott, 501–524. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. U.S. Congress. Congressional Record. 67th Cong., 2nd sess., 1922. Vol. 62, pt. 12: 12162. Velikova, Roumiana. “Troping in Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Writings, 1900–1921.” Arizona Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 49–64. Walker, Cheryl. Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. “What Mary Austin Says About Indians.” American Indian Magazine 6, no. 4 (Winter 1919): 181. Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction.” In A Modern Southern Reader: Major Stories, Drama, Poetry, Essays and Reminiscences from the Twentieth-Century South, edited by Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway, 537–548. 1956; reprint, Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1986. Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas: and Other Papers. London: Walter Scott, 1888.

Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism

169

Wilkins, David E. “The U.S. Supreme Court’s Explication of ‘Federal Plenary Power’: An Analysis of Case Law Affecting Tribal Sovereignty, 1886–1914.” American Indian Quarterly 18, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 349–368. ——— , and K. Tsianina Lomawaima. Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. Wilson, Woodrow. “Colonies and Nation: A Short History of the People of the United States.” Harper’s Monthly 103 (October 1901): 791–807. Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Young, William A. Quest for Harmony: Native American Spiritual Traditions. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002. Zagarell, Sandra A. “Country’s Portrayal of Community and the Exclusion of Difference.” In New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, edited by June Howard, 39–60. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Zitkala-Ša. “America, Home of the Red Man.” American Indian Magazine 6, no. 4 (Winter 1919): 165–167. ——— . American Indian Stories. 1921; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. ——— . Americanize the First American: A Plan of Regeneration. N.p., pamphlet, 1921. ——— . “The California Indians of Today.” California Indian Herald 1, no. 3 (╛╛July 1923): 10. ——— . “The Coronation of Chief Powhatan Retold.” American Indian Magazine 6, no. 4 (Winter 1919): 179–180. ——— . “Editorial Comment.” American Indian Magazine 6, no. 3 (Autumn 1918): 113–114. ——— . “Editorial Comment.” American Indian Magazine 7, no. 1 (Spring 1919): 5–9. ——— . “Editorial Comment.” American Indian Magazine 7, no. 2 (Summer 1919): 61–63. ——— . “Heart to Heart Talk.” California Indian Herald 2, no. 5 (May 1924): 2–3. ——— . “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” Atlantic Monthly 85 (╆January 1900): 37–47. ——— . “Indian Gifts to Civilized Man.” American Indian Magazine 6, no. 3 (Autumn 1918): 115–116. ——— . “An Indian Praying on the Hilltop.” American Indian Magazine 7, no. 2 (Summer 1919): 92. ——— . “An Indian Teacher Among Indians.” Atlantic Monthly 85 (March 1900): 381–386. ——— . “The Indian’s Awakening.” American Indian Magazine 4, no. 1 (Spring 1916): 57–59. ——— . Old Indian Legends. 1901; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. ——— . “Letter to the Chiefs and Headmen of the Tribes.” American Indian Magazine 6, no. 4 (Winter 1919): 196–197. ——— . Old Indian Legends, v–vi. 1901; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. ——— . “The Red Man’s America.” American Indian Magazine 5, no. 1 (Spring 1917): 64. ——— . “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” Atlantic Monthly 85 (February 1900): 185–194. ——— . “Secretary’s Report in Brief.” American Indian Magazine 6, no. 3 (Autumn 1918): 122–124. ——— . “Side by Side.” The Earlhamite 2, no. 12 (March 16, 1896): 177–179. ——— . “The Soft-Hearted Sioux.” Harper’s Monthly 103 (October 1901): 505–508. ——— . “The Trial Path.” Harper’s Monthly 103 (October 1901): 741–744. ——— . “Why I Am a Pagan.” Atlantic Monthly 90 (December 1902): 801–803. ——— . “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman.” 1921. American Indian Stories, 159–182. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

A ngelique V . N i x on

Poem and Tale as Double Helix in Joy Harjo’s A Map to the Next World

We climb and keep climbing, our children wrapped in smallpox blankets to keep them warm. Spider shows us how to weave a sticky pattern from the muddy curses of our enemy to get us safely to the Milky Way. We had to leave our homes behind us, just as we were left behind by progress. We do not want your version of progress. —Joy Harjo, “Returning from the Enemy”

H

onest, unmerciful, and direct, Joy Harjo’s poetry engages in the complex social and political issues of not only Native Americans but also other marginalized and oppressed peoples. Harjo writes her poetry using a unique narrative style, and the role of storytelling is prominent in her work.1 Her diverse style and complex subject matter opens up her work to numerous theoretical readings. For instance, the ecological and ecofeminist studies of Harjo’s work present intriguing connections between ecofeminism and Native American literature while exploring the history of colonization and domination. 2 Moreover, the social, cultural, and historical critiques using feminist and postcolonial theories examine how she brings awareness to the Native American struggle by incorporating the past into the present in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 18, Number 1 (March 2006): pp. 1–21. Copyright © 2006 Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures.

171

172

Angelique V. Nixon

her poetry.3 And feminist readings of Harjo and other Native American writers analyze the complexity of culture and voice within this literature.4 Certainly, Harjo’s work can be read from a variety of perspectives, and I would assert that it is difficult to simply apply one approach to her poems because of the array of issues she touches upon in her work. As many Native American scholars, such as Paula Gunn Allen and Craig Womack, among others, have argued, Native American literature must be understood in the Native context. Therefore, Harjo’s poetry (as with Native American literature in general) must be read through an understanding of Native American culture, history, cosmology, myths, traditions, and philosophies.5 Like many other Native writers, Harjo offers a look into the history, culture, beliefs, and sufferings of her people, and the social, political, and cultural implications of her work resonate as she offers new insights and perceptions into these issues. In her collection A Map to the Next World, Harjo’s distinctive style continues to complicate the notion of poetry and prose poems. In a review of the book, Zoë Anglesey states that Harjo’s fifth collection of “poems, tales, and recollections lift the lyric into storytelling like sweetgrass smoke” (66). The review praises Harjo for her brilliant work in writing the truth while balancing “the celebrated and condemned” (67). Skillfully, Harjo incorporates several dimensions of the Native landscape in the work by delving into social, political, and historical issues, as she empowers women (particularly Native women), crosses cultural boundaries, celebrates nature, and defies Western ideologies. In this study, I will show how Harjo constructs the poems and tales in A Map to the Next World to be multidimensional and nonlinear through what I describe as complex interplay and interchange. Specifically, I posit that each poem and tale operates as a double helix within Harjo’s collection, which I see as a metaphor for the unique relationship between poems and tales that are circular, interdependent links, not simply connected but rather intersecting, mutually dependent, and perpetually moving in and out of each other. The most apparent connection lies in the titles, where the poems’ titles are uppercased and the tales’ titles are lowercased. More importantly, the titles of certain poems and tales when transposed assist in clearly envisioning the circular, interdependent links that reflect the relationship between each poem and tale. As I elucidate in the textual analysis later, the narrative of many tales focus on a detail or an event, which is then illuminated by the corresponding poem to a broader yet elusive perspective or insight. Moreover, a poem precedes each tale; therefore, in order to engage in the interdependence between poem and tale, a circular reading is required to see the double helix created by this unique relationship. By reading Harjo’s collection through this double helix, we can achieve a greater understanding of the multidimensional perspective she posits of the world.

Poem and Tale as Double Helix

173

The poems and tales included in A Map to the Next World contain a distinctive melding of narrative, storytelling, and songlike lyrics. The running themes in the collection, in particular those of history, myths, legends, the feminine, nature, land, different cultures, and the nonhuman natural world, among others, resound throughout each poem and tale, and these cannot be understood in terms of Western dichotomies. Harjo’s work, as well as other Native American writings, is grounded in Native American philosophies. Such philosophies are characterized by worldviews that are nonhierarchical and nonlinear and that reveal the interconnectedness of all living things (humans, plants, animals, the earth, land, air, oceans, planets, rocks, etc.).6 To understand Native American writings, readers must comprehend them within the context of these philosophies. In her introduction to Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1974–1994, Paula Gunn Allen traces the history of these writings by placing them into historical and cultural contexts of the atrocities that Native Americans have faced: genocide, forced removals from tribal lands, colonization, and forced assimilation. In her introduction to Spider Woman’s Granddaughters, Allen explains the necessity of context for Native American stories: Context is important to understanding our stories, and for Indian people that context is both ritual and historical, contemporary and ancient. We are contemporary because we survive in the face of a brutal holocaust that seeks to wipe us out, and our context is as much historical as it is tribal. (2)

Furthermore, she argues that tribal aesthetics utilize elements of both oral and Western traditions because of the historical context involved; therefore, this mixing of literary conventions may appear confusing and degrading to those who uphold the boundaries of genre (2–3). Native American literature continues to blur, combine, and mix various elements of literary conventions with oral storytelling; Allen asserts: Native writers write out of tribal traditions, and into them. They, like oral storytellers, work within a literary tradition that is at base connected to ritual and beyond that to tribal metaphysics or mysticism. What has been experienced over the ages mystically and communally—with individual experiences fitting within that overarching pattern—forms the basis for tribal aesthetics and therefore of tribal literatures. (5)

In other words, Native American literature must be read through a Native lens that acknowledges the historical and cultural context of tribal life

174

Angelique V. Nixon

from precontact to European colonization and domination to present-day struggles. These experiences influence tribal aesthetics along with storytelling, ritual, and mysticism. Consequently, to understand Native American writing, one must have a keen awareness of the context in which most contemporary Native American writing grounds itself. My analysis of Harjo’s book provides a way of reading and understanding the Native worldview that Harjo maps throughout her collection. In A Map to the Next World, Harjo expresses a circular vision through the poems and tales; they continually lead back into each other, as each poem and tale becomes a double helix that serves to reinforce the story inside the tale, which then curves back to the poem. To fully envision this relationship between poem and tale, the last poem of the collection shall be considered first because it initiates a circular reading of the entire book. With two poems in one, “In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World” contains two-line stanzas with alternating italics to indicate the separation of the two intertwining poems, which read like songs. The title alone presents two sides or realms of the same world, which can be seen as both opposing and complementary. These poems together create a vision of the world as multiple, varying, and changing. To see the intertwining and double nature of this poem, I quote at length, starting at the beginning, to provide a context for analysis: In these dark hours of questioning everything matters: each membrane of lung and how wind travels, I had been traveling in the dark, through many worlds, the four corners of my mat carried by guardians in the shape of crows. the french fry under the table the baby dropped, my son grieving far away in a land of howling trains and enemies. Above me was the comet, a messenger who flew parallel to my heart. The speed of light translated my intimate life as seconds Here loss is measured in tons, not ounces. what-I-should-have-said and what-I-should-have-done are creatures of habit as a newborn star shimmering there, and then I stopped counting and began to comprehend the view. sitting on the bed, blocking my view of the sleeping moon. If I get up to play my horn I’ll awaken the neighbors.

And

Poem and Tale as Double Helix

175

My Son was my dark-eyed baby again, kicking his legs after a bath, And then he was a man with fire in his hands. If I get up to pee I’ll lessen my chances of catching the wave of remembering and forgetting. (133)

The speaker establishes a specific Native worldview through multiple connections between the earth and humans, as we enter several stories of journeys undertaken almost in a dream state. Each of the poems, read separately, creates its own circle, which turns back on itself and begins again, thereby prompting a rereading. Reading the two together as positioned in the text jars the notion of linear reading because the alternating double lines are positioned in such a way to evoke a nonlinear perspective, as they can be read both together and separately. These two poems in one are in fact linked through a circular interdependence because each circle depends on the other for meaning. The speaker travels through diverse worlds searching and hoping for answers to the destruction and devastation that surround the darkness of the poems: And there were other trails through the dark; children began killing each other and humans had forgotten In the wake of gods who spiraled to earth unaware they were falling. They fought and destroyed each other. the promise to see the gods in any stranger who came to their door for food. I found myself on the Nile in a felucca Now we think we are left to our own devices, no one to slay the monsters devouring us, no one to translate the din of the spin. (134)

While two varied worlds are presented in these two poems, they also entwine to form one poem that shares the story of a world in turmoil with mass devastation, as utter disregard and disrespect grew among the humans who could not follow the simple peaceful messages of the “gods,” who could be the earth spirits. The “monsters” (as per Harjo’s notes at the end of the book) reside in the “Lower World” of the “three worlds in Muscogean cosmology” and “roam this earth when humans set loose destruction by way of their negligence” (137). Once we know the meaning of “monster” for the

176

Angelique V. Nixon

Muscogees, the poem reveals multiple meanings within the world that the speakers share. As the collection ends with this poem, readers are guided back to the beginning of the book, thereby creating a loop, which then creates complex relations between the poems and tales upon rereading. Having laid the foundations of a circular reading, I will now explore the relationship between specific poems and tales with regard to the circular, interdependent links that create a double helix of each poem and tale.7 I will describe the tale first and then the poem, opposite to the way they are presented in the text, in order to explain how each tale is indeed based on a detail or event that inspires the broader perspective of the corresponding poem. In “the psychology of earth and sky,” the speaker tells the story of watching the dawn, while traveling through her past and present as she connects coming home with dawn: And dawn arrives, no matter the struggle of the night and how endless that night might be. We are part of an old story and involved in it are migrations of the winds, of ocean currents, of seeds, songs and generations of nations. In this life it seems like I am always leaving, flying over this earth that harbors many lives. I was born Indian, female and artist in the Creek Nation. It is still grey out as I follow the outline of memory. (14)

The speaker expresses the fluidity of Native storytelling through migrations and generations, as the past through memory becomes an intricate part of the present. The story unfolds as this woman travels through her past to share moments that reflect her Native American heritage, and the interconnectedness of the human and natural world resonates. As the speaker remembers her teenage self arriving home after being out all night, she appreciates dawn: “I can still breathe it, that awareness of being alive and part of the ceremony for the rising of the sun. I often lived for this moment of reconciliation, where night and morning met” (14–15). The speaker relates these moments to her feelings of hesitation in leaving her daughter and granddaughters, and the poem is dedicated to them “as a guardian spirit” (15). After reading this tale, the corresponding poem “Songline of Dawn” reveals a deeper perspective into the significance of story being told: We are ascending through the dawn the sky blushed with the fever of attraction.

Poem and Tale as Double Helix

177

I don’t want to leave my daughter, or the babies. I can see their house, a refuge in the dark near the university. Protect them, oh gods of the scarlet light who love us fiercely despite our acts of stupidity our utter failings. May this morning light be food for their bones, for their spirits dressed in manes of beautiful black hair in skins the color of the earth as it meets the sky. (13)

The poem and tale are linked through the story of the granddaughter and memories of dawn in the tale; the poem becomes interdependent on the tale and a circular reading creates more insights into the stories being shared. The poem reflects “the psychology of earth and sky” through the metaphors of dawn, while the tale represents the “Songline of Dawn” through a narrative of memories and feelings about dawn. The relationship occurring here is not only circular but also interdependent, thus linking the two inextricably and creating a double helix in which both are needed to fully express the significance of each part. Other tales and poems exhibit similar relationships throughout the collection. The tale “the appearance of the sacred was not likely” describes the birth of a granddaughter and an appearance of a Navajo deity to a blind woman prior to the child’s birth. The speaker, who is the grandmother, connects the deity’s visit to the birth: It was not by accident that this granddaughter is born to us at this particular time. I see her as a link to the prophecy, one who came to us because of our love for this land, for the people. When she came into the world she was accompanied by the spirits of her father’s great-grandmother, and my great-aunt. (22)

The narrative presents a story about a Native American birth, and the speaker tells us of spirits visiting and butterflies that flew in circles around them, which meant the girl child was on her way. This child was born with “the gift of being able to see sharply into the belly of the earth, and with that ability comes the responsibility to speak of what she sees, no matter the difficult truth of it” (23). The granddaughter is empowered by this relationship with the earth, and her voice can “reveal a map of destiny” (23). This “map of destiny” is only fully illuminated through the parallel poem, “A Map to the Next World,” which provides the message from the deity mentioned in the related tale.

178

Angelique V. Nixon

The poem on its own reads like instructions or advice from some wiser source, whereas after reading the tale, the poem becomes a complex interchange among those in the tale: In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky. My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens. For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet. The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit. In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it. Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace. (19)

The voice of the deity speaks through this poem and tells of the prophecy mentioned in the tale, with criticism of what humans have done to the earth. Continuing with a list of “the errors of our forgetfulness,” including pollution, devastation of forests, and losing our connection with birds and other animals, the deity offers a vivid description of human destructions: “What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood” (19). Humans have forgotten how to respect the earth and have failed to see the consequences of this act; both poem and tale reiterate this idea in two different ways—through the story and the deity’s message. The rest of the poem appears to be directed toward the granddaughter in the tale, as the “message” carries on with “An imperfect map will have to do, little one. / The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood” (20). This entry refers to the birth, which happens

Poem and Tale as Double Helix

179

in the tale, further reflecting the interdependent connections between the two. Moreover, the deity directs the grandchild: “You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way” (20). With references to ancestors who will assist on the journey, the poem incorporates several elements of Native American tribal life, culture, and history, which serve as a guide for the granddaughter in the tale. The multiple perspectives within this double helix relationship are revealed after engaging with both poem and tale, and as the end of the poem aptly combines history, earth, humans, and a circular vision, it is clear that the deity’s voice travels to all those who can hear: Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds. We were never perfect. Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans. We might make them again, she said. Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end. You must make your own map. (21)

The girl child of the prophecy must make her own map, just as Native Americans must and all humans of this earth should in order to see our circular existence. The female earth “who was” a star is powerful, as she gives advice to the travelers and explains a nonlinear and nonhierarchical viewpoint. The association of women and nature in the poem reveals interconnectedness and the sharing of important stories. At the end of the tale, a clear link back to the poem occurs with the speaker’s discussion of what could be the deity, the earth, the sacred, or all three: “Her appearance here with us marks a convergence of all of us, yet she is ultimately, definitely, herself ” (23). Hence, both tale and poem share a story, as the poem reveals the “map of destiny” through the voice of “the sacred” and the tale provides the sacred, or deity’s, story and the context of the map. This interplay between poem and tale further reveals how the metaphor of the double helix allows for a more complex reading.

180

Angelique V. Nixon

“The Whirlwind” and “all your enemies will be vanquished” exhibit a similar relationship even though at first glance they appear unrelated. They do, in fact, create a circular interdependence because the story in the tale directly inspires the poem. The narrator of the tale tells of a trip to Madras, India, and a visit with a Vedic astrologer, who offers predictions, one of which is “By 19__ all of your enemies will be vanquished” (67). In explaining the Vedic science, the speaker implies the similarities of this science to Native American thinking and philosophy: “Forming the basis of this science is the understanding that we are all heavenly bodies in a dynamic interchange with the earth, sun, other planets and virtually all life. . . . We are a community together, breathe together” (67). The speaker indicates a Native American ancestry through references like this one and another one that points to “my people” being mistaken for sun worshipers by Europeans. As the speaker reacts to the prediction by the Vedic astrologer, the story continues as the narrator waits for the prediction to come true. And it does but only through the “Mvskoke shape of possibility”: “Fear is the potent elixir that motivates enemies. And there can be no enemies when there is no fear. Fear makes an illusion of separation” (68). After making this allegorylike statement, the narrator then shares a story of “being attacked by a monster in the dream world” (68), which provides a context for the statement about fear as she fights the monster by letting go of any fear of this frightful entity: “His hand went through me because there was no fear to keep him there. Then he was gone” (68). Thus, the speaker actually holds the power to vanquish enemies and must experience it in the dream world to see the possibility of the prediction coming true. This perspective about fear aligns with a Native American worldview and circles back into the corresponding poem, assisting in a clearer interpretation. After reading the tale, “The Whirlwind” becomes a dynamic struggle with the forces of nature and rhythm of the earth fighting fear, power, and destruction. The “she” in the poem represents nature under attack, while at the same time “she” represents the human emotions of power, greed, and fear when they have taken control of a person, which then adversely affects the environment. Faster and faster she whirls in the dark, the jealous green dark, the make-witchcraftin-the-holes dark. Faster and faster. Here is a hole made by a cigarette. I couldn’t stop it then, she said, and I won’t stop it now. Faster and Faster.

Poem and Tale as Double Helix

181

I want that lover of sweet madness, That powwow prancer I want prettier than you, faster and faster. (64, italics in original)

Her struggle is made apparent through the shift between her voice in italics and the speaker, and she explains what has happened: “I can’t stop now, she said, see how / beautiful I am. / I am brighter than you / in my green clothes of power” (64, italics in original). Power and greed in the form of control and material possessions have consumed her, yet we can see her fighting through the poem with fear of what she has become. Her voice should also be read as both the enemy and fear of the enemy described in “all your enemies will be vanquished” because of the following scene in the poem: She tries to enter my breathing, and then the gates of believing, to the place of let go. Faster and faster, the thing urges her on. This thing made of acid of heartbreak and hatred. (65, italics in original)

These lines become illuminated through the tale; the “thing” is the fear driving the monster in the dream world, as fear “feeds on itself, decay / and disaster” (65). The speaker reconciles with fear through traveling into the past, “through forced migrations / and starvation of relatives”; the present, “To the truth of the matter / it is turned back”; and future, “To the hole of if only / it is back” and “To the place before / and after / you” (65–66, italics in original). The nonlinear descriptions throughout the poem, along with complex and ambiguous visions of the feminine and nature, ultimately illustrate a Native American worldview where change and interconnections are a constant, thereby crossing boundaries and presenting a view of the world that is counter to the exclusionary and destructive practices of the West. Through the correlation made with the tale, this poem not only allows the earth to “speak” of destruction but also engages with the “enemy” (the dominant culture, colonizers, and oppressors), as the speakers in both tale and poem search for answers. However, fear is also the enemy, which creates the circular interdependence between the poem and tale as they become linked through the images of fear and the defeat of fear. Similarly, the relationship between “threads of blood and spirit” and “Protocol” presents another dimension to the circular, interdependent links between poem and tale because they are fully immersed in each other. The

182

Angelique V. Nixon

narrator of the tale shares a few events and details that can be seen as sparking the poem: a visit to Hawaii, where an offering is made to the female fire deity Pele; Mvskoke storytelling by relatives; and a greeting written by a Native woman. These events twist and turn through the story with moments of reflection about the importance of protocol: “When traveling to another country it’s important to recognize the spirits there, and acknowledge them with prayers, so that you won’t inadvertently offend or hurt by ignorance of protocol of that place. . . . Protocol translates as respect and reverence” (118). The narrator learns different perspectives of protocol through Mil in Hawaii, who explains “the protocol of prayer” and opening “with a songline of ancestors by naming your mother, then her mother and all the way back” (118). Recognizing this idea of naming in the Creek Nation, the narrator travels through the past to remember how “storytelling was a ritual of making a pattern of relatives, naming who was related to whom and the evolution of those lines of meaning until there was a web of intricate sense” (118–119). Another act of protocol occurs when the speaker receives a note from a Native student introducing herself by naming her ancestors and tribe, and the narrator says, “I was honored and impressed protocol had not been lost or discarded as unnecessary in the post-colonial world” (119). Such protocol “provides a thread of meaning that goes back generations, thousands of years, like the naming of ancestors in Okmulgee or Hawai‘i” (119). Thus, protocol maintains the “threads of blood and spirit” among Indigenous peoples connected to the land and knowing the earth. Just as the tale reveals multiple layers of story, the poem “Protocol” encompasses several dimensions of Native American life and connections to other Native peoples, while revealing how humans are connected through blood and spirit. Upon engaging the tale, the speaker in the poem is not only talking to ancestors and other Indigenous peoples but also the friend Mililani from Hawaii spoken of in the tale. This creates a complexity and depth to the circular reading because one could not know this without the tale. The speaker travels with the intricacies of communication through time and space, past and present: I do not know your language though I hear the breaking of waves through vowels. It is blue and if I am to follow protocol I will introduce myself through my mother and hers until you know the liquid mass of ancestors and in that you might know that I did not find myself here on your island by some coincidence. [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

Poem and Tale as Double Helix

183

When the Mvskoke emerged from that misty original place we were led by four young winds, and a star who took the form of talking fire. (116, lines 7–12 omitted)

As the speaker incorporates tribal past and history with the present, the circular interdependence between tale and poem become clear through knowing the significance of “you,” knowing what the proper protocol is, and understanding its necessity, which is revealed through the tale. These specifics are illuminated through a second reading of the poem after engaging the tale, as we travel through tribal stories and history—through the world of unjust history, “when treaties were forced with blood. / Those who signed were killed. / Now I have a gas range and there is no end to the war” (116), and simultaneously through the world of other Indigenous people who have suffered similar atrocities, “the tyranny / of false rulers and how though they appear to dominate / your island they are small and brittle and will break” (116). These perspectives become fully realized through the tale, as readers are taken though many dimensions of this history. The immersion of tale and poem continue at the end of each as the two not only reflect each other but also become mutually dependent. In “threads of blood and spirit,” maintaining Native peoples’ existence lies in “protocol” as “a key to assuming sovereignty,” and from a symbiotic perspective, the speaker of “Protocol” pronounces a melding and sharing between Native peoples of Hawaii and America through protocols of offerings, which “will make us vulnerable / to the shimmer of the heart” (117). This sharing ties into the story of Hawaii in the tale and correlates to the meaning of protocol and Native relationships: “This is how I know myself. / This is how I know who you are” (117). Harjo asserts a strong and necessary connection between Indigenous peoples and the importance of tribal culture and protocol. Through a circular reading of poem and tale as a double helix, we can see the multi-dimensional, nonlinear, inclusive worldview that Harjo expresses in this story that connects different cultures and perspectives. In studying Harjo’s poems and tales as linked through circularity and interdependence through the metaphor of the double helix, A Map to the Next World incites a world-making journey that encourages readers to be active participants in knowing and learning. Captivating and powerfully stirring, Harjo’s work resonates with Native American philosophies, Muscogean cosmology, the real world struggle of Indigenous peoples, and various historical situations and events. These daring combinations demonstrate the ways in which Harjo participates in and is connected to Native traditions of storytelling. In the essay “Kochinnenako in Academe,” Paula Gunn Allen posits a feminist tribal approach to reading tribal stories, and she asserts that tribal women’s “literature and philosophies are more often accretive than

184

Angelique V. Nixon

linear, more achronological than chronological, and more dependent on harmonious relationships of all elements within the field of perception than western culture in general is thought to be” (2125). Furthermore, she explains that “traditional peoples perceive their world in a unified-field fashion that is very different from the single-focus perception that generally characterizes western masculinist, monotheistic modes of perception” (2126). Harjo’s writing exemplifies much of what Allen posits as being indicative of Native American literature and tribal aesthetics: accretive, achronological, and dependent on harmonious relationships and unified perceptions. Through complex interplay and interchange between poems and tales, Harjo creates awareness of the Native struggle from the past into the future, while also projecting the nonhierarchical, nonlinear tribal worldview that defies Western ideologies, dualism, and binary thinking. Native American writing such as A Map to the Next World engages readers in diverse ways of thinking and perceiving our existence, which I would argue creates the possibility for change. Ultimately, each poem and tale suggests a double helix, each strand assisting in comprehension of the other, where both prose and lyric reside in A Map to the Next World.

No t e s 1. In “An Art of Saying: Joy Harjo’s Poetry and the Survival of Storytelling,” Mary Leen focuses on the complexities of storytelling and its role in Native American writing and explores the role of the storyteller in Harjo’s poetry. She uses discussions by a variety of scholars and writers, including Simon Ortiz, Richard Erodies, bell hooks, Kenneth Roemer, among others, in order to analyze the theme of survival in Harjo’s poetry. Leen discusses the different types of narrative and storytelling in Harjo’s poetry, ultimately revealing the lack of borders between humans and nonhumans and nature, nonlinear time lines, and the various subject-positions in her work. Additionally, in “Notes toward a New Multicultural Criticism: Three Works by Women of Color,” John F. Crawford analyzes the themes of survival and techniques of ceremony in Harjo’s She Had Some Horses, discussing them in terms of the social and political. 2. Joni Adamson Clarke examines how “Nature has been socially constructed since the seventeenth century to support colonial objectives” by placing American literature into the context of marginalized literature. Using feminist, literary, and cultural theory of the likes of Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Julia Kristeva, Clarke argues that contemporary Native American writers make their readers question the preconceived notions of “Nature.” Through the works of Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, and Joy Harjo, she explores the interconnectedness of all forms of domination. JiaYi Cheng-Levine focuses on “the relationships between environmental racism, gender-biased colonial ideology, and ecological imbalance.” Studying writers like Leslie Silko, Joy Harjo, Pat Mora, and Ana Castillo, Cheng-Levine addresses their “representations of the land” in contrast to the culture of “the dominant European tradition.”

Poem and Tale as Double Helix

185

3. For works that focus on historical perspectives in Native American writing, see Perreault, “New Dreaming”; Jahner, “Knowing All the Way Down to Fire”; Donovan, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature; Bezner, “A Song to Call the Deer in Creek”; Hussain, “Joy Harjo and Her Poetics as Praxis”; and Scarry, “Representing Real Worlds.” Jeanne Perreault discusses three Native American writers and how, in their work, “dreaming constitutes a semiotic field in which realities are made in naming” (120). She argues that their poetry reveals how the horrid realities of the past must be addressed in order to face the present and the future as they intersect in the poetry and how dreams become transformations that are acts of resistance. Perreault recognizes Harjo’s images of survival, as she sees Harjo’s poetry embracing the past, surviving the present, and facing the future. In her conclusion Perreault argues that white readers and critics must analyze and question the way they read minority literature. Both Elaine A. Jahner and Kathleen Donovan use feminist theory to analyze Harjo’s work, as they too discuss the difficulties of reading multicultural literature. Kevin Bezner discusses Harjo’s Creek background and ancestry within her poetry. He analyzes the ways Harjo incorporates myths and stories into her poetry along with the present. Azfar Hussain discusses Harjo’s poetry as praxis through a postcolonial reading, and John Scarry demonstrates how Harjo’s poetry represents reality. 4. For feminist perspectives on Harjo, see Jahner, “Knowing All the Way Down to Fire”; Ludlow, “Working (In) the In-Between”; and Holmes, “This Woman Can Cross Any Line.” Elaine A. Jahner engages in the difficulties of reading multicultural work, particularly Native American women’s poetry, because of unfamiliar cultural histories that are grounded in the work. She thinks that critics should discover better ways of discussing metaphors that mediate between cultures. Examining the work of two Native American women poets, Harjo and Linda Hogan, Jahner uses the theories of Julia Kristeva and Gayatri Spivak to discuss metaphoric significance and cognitive style with regard to social context. Kathleen Donovan explores the issue of voice in Native American literature from different feminist theoretical perspectives. Her chapter focusing on Hélène Cixous and Harjo explores the complex link between darkness and femaleness in their work with regard to the transformative power of language. Jeannie Ludlow analyzes Harjo’s “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window” and Louise Erdrich’s “The Lady in the Pink Mustang” using Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. She proposes that these poems by “mixed-bloods” tell stories about how Native Americans can find identity in isolation being “in the in-between without a choice, without a community, and often without will” (24–25). Her argument focuses on “one interrogation of the in-between as a symbolic location for these poets, for Native American women, for readers, and for critics (especially for Western critics working with Nonwestern texts),” with the critic always being in the position of the in-between (25). Kristine Holmes studies the female trickster characters in the poems of Harjo and Nora Naranjo-Morse. While acknowledging the difficulty in using the term “feminism” with regard to Native American writing, she argues that these authors provide “a feminist revision of tricksterism” (46). 5. Norma Wilson, in The Nature of Native American Poetry, discusses the deep roots that contemporary Native American poetry has within the land, oral tradition, and history. In a chapter discussing Harjo’s writing, Wilson explains that in Harjo’s poetry, “the ground speaks through voices of people intimately related to the earth” (109). In analyzing many aspects of Harjo’s poetry, Wilson articulates how

186

Angelique V. Nixon

Harjo writes the past, present, and future, while “condemning injustice, lamenting suffering, and speaking for this earth” (122). 6. Patricia Clark Smith and Paula Gunn Allen, in their article “Earthly Relations, Carnal Knowledge: Southwestern American Indian Women Writers and Landscape,” discuss and explore the meaning of land in Native American writing, particularly in Native American women’s writing. Smith and Allen assert that “American Indian people—even urban dwellers—live in the context of the land. Their literature thus must be understood in the context of both the land and the rituals through which they affirm their relationship to it” (176). They study the relationship between ritual and American Indian literature and then discuss how women and nature factor into this relationship. The article also explores the diversity in Native American Women’s writings, in particular how the land is presented in the work of Luci Tapahonso, Leslie Silko, and Harjo. They reveal how in all three of these women’s writing the land is connected to the people and the people connected to the land. 7. A Map to the Next World is divided into four parts. I have chosen key poems and tales from each part for analysis in an effort to offer a way of reading the collection as a whole.

Wor k s Ci t e d Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Introduction. Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1974–1994. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. 3–17. ——— . Introduction. Spider Woman’s Granddaughters. New York: Fawcett Books, 1989. 1–25. ——— . “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2108–2126. Anglesey, Zoë. Rev. of A Map to the Next World, by Joy Harjo. Multicultural Review 9.2 (2000): 66–67. Bezner, Kevin. “A Song to Call the Deer in Creek: The Creek Indian Heritage in Joy Harjo’s Poetry.” Eclectic Literary Forum 5.3 (1995): 44–46. Cheng-Levine, Jia-Yi. “Neo-Colonialism, Post-Colonial Ecology, and Ecofeminism in the Works of Native American, Chicano/a, and International Writers.” Diss. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1997. DAI 58 (1997): 0445. Clarke, Joni Adamson. “A Place to See: Ecological Literary Theory and Practice (Native American).” Diss. The University of Arizona, 1995. DAI 56 (1995): 1775. Crawford, John F. “Notes toward a New Multicultural Criticism: Three Works by Women of Color.” A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 155–195. Donovan, Kathleen M. Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Harjo, Joy. A Map to the Next World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. Holmes, Kristine. “‘This Woman Can Cross Any Line’: Feminist Tricksters in the Works of Nora Naranjo-Morse and Joy Harjo.” Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 7.1 (1995): 45–63. Hussain, Azfar. “Joy Harjo and Her Poetics as Praxis: A ‘Postcolonial’ Political Economy of the Body, Land, Labor, and Language.” Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies 15.2 (2000): 27–61.

Poem and Tale as Double Helix

187

Jahner, Elaine A. “Knowing All the Way Down to Fire.” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 163–183. Leen, Mary. “An Art of Saying: Joy Harjo’s Poetry and the Survival of Storytelling.” American Indian Quarterly 19.1 (1995): 1–16. Ludlow, Jeannie. “Working (In) the In-Between: Poetry, Criticism, Interrogation, and Interruption.” Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 6.1 (1994): 24–42. Perreault, Jeanne. “New Dreaming: Joy Harjo, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon Silko.” Deferring a Dream: Literary Sub-Versions of the American Columbiad. Ed. Gert Buelens and Ernst Rudin. Boston: Birkhauser Verlag, 1994. 120–136. Scarry, John. “Representing Real Worlds: The Evolving Poetry of Joy Harjo.” World Literature Today: A Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 66.2 (1992): 286–291. Smith, Patricia Clark, with Paula Gunn Allen. “Earthly Relations, Carnal Knowledge: Southwestern American Indian Women Writers and Landscape.” The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art. Ed. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 174–190. Wilson, Norma C. The Nature of Native American Poetry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

E lizabeth G argano

Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence

I

n a 1985 interview Louise Erdrich describes her fascination with the sacred stories of traditional Ojibwa culture, separate tales that nevertheless form an interrelated whole. These stories, she acknowledges, have served as an aesthetic model for her fiction. Such interrelated oral stories generally revolve around a central and unifying figure, often a powerful manito from the spirit world or a human being with magical powers. In Erdrich’s words, One tells a story about an incident that leads to another incident in the life of this particular figure. Night after night, or day after day, it’s a story telling cycle. It’s the sort of thing where people know what they’re going to say. They’re old stories, but the stories have incorporated different elements of non-Chippewa [non-Ojibwa] or European culture as they’ve gone on, so that sometimes you see a great traditional story with some sort of fairytale added to it. (Chavkin and Chavkin 4)

Erdrich describes a rich and enduring tradition that achieves a dynamic balance between continuity and innovation. The storytelling tradition can open at any point to include new elements. Hospitable to contemporary experiences, it maintains a profound cultural relevance and significance; it Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 31, Number 1 (April 2006): pp. 27–39. Copyright © 2006 Children’s Literature Association.

189

190

Elizabeth Gargano

continues to serve its Ojibwa audience by reflecting their experience back to them and imbuing such experience with sacred meanings, while also situating it within familiar cultural patterns. In her two novels for children, The Birchbark House (1999) and its recently published sequel, The Game of Silence (2005), Erdrich creates histories that are also cultural texts in this specific revitalizing sense. In both novels she employs a cyclical narrative structure and interweaves the daily experiences of her human protagonists with traditional stories of such powerful spirit-mentors as Nanabozho, the great trickster-creator. Erdrich’s creative juxtapositions shed new light on the lives of the human characters, while also illuminating the regenerative powers of traditional Ojibwa storytelling. In recent years such critics as Hertha Wong, James Ruppert, and Catherine Rainwater have explored the Ojibwa roots of Erdrich’s use of the story cycle form in her rich body of fiction for adults. Hertha Wong, for example, emphasizes the “polyvocality” of “Native American oral traditions” as a source for Erdrich’s use of interwoven but separate narratives in her first novel, Love Medicine (Wong 173). James Ruppert’s “Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Love Medicine” argues that the novel “celebrate[s] [Native American] culture by [means of ] a continuing recreation of the multiple facets of identity through multiple narrative” (230). Catherine Rainwater reminds us that Erdrich’s novel Tracks “draws on a variety of oral storytelling strategies” (145), while The Bingo Palace embodies a “collective narrative voice” that combines the “authority and humility” of the “traditional oral storyteller” (152). In contrast, the story cycle aspects of Erdrich’s children’s fiction have received relatively little attention. In her illuminating essay “Sea of Good Intentions: Native American Books for Children,” Melissa Kay Thompson emphasizes the historically and psychologically accurate content of Erdrich’s children’s novel, as opposed to the Native American stereotypes in so much children’s fiction. Understandably, other critics have also focused on the content of Erdrich’s novel rather than its form. Lisa Hermien Makman, for instance, contends that Erdrich’s depiction of an actively-working child protagonist typifies multiculturalism’s emphasis on child labor as integrated into the fabric of culture.1 As I argue in this article, however, an appreciation of Erdrich’s skillful incorporation of Ojibwa story cycle elements is crucial to understanding both The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence. Drawing on the conventions of oral storytelling, Erdrich repeatedly interrupts both novels’ forward momentum with self-contained traditional tales that emphasize cultural continuity while also serving to explain and contextualize present action. Rather than foregrounding a linear, plot-driven narrative, Erdrich subtly interweaves events into a natural and spiritual landscape where change is cyclical and at times illusory. Even the most dramatic actions are woven like bright threads

Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles

191

into nature’s dense and variegated tapestry. Further, Erdrich’s haunting and lyrical narratives affirm a collective cultural vision beyond the individual consciousness of her fictive protagonist. Incorporating story cycle elements and subordinating linear narrations to a cyclical narrative structure, Erdrich’s novels for children reflect an Ojibwa worldview that affirms gratitude to nature for its gifts, the preciousness of communal knowledge and traditions, and the integration of daily activities with sacred experience. Thus, Erdrich’s work also implicitly critiques Euro-American assumptions about humanity’s supremacy over nature and the importance of individualism, as well as a generalized Western tendency to accept stark divisions between the sacred and secular realms. In sum, Erdrich’s novels fuse form and content to a new end, calling readers to understand her child protagonist’s adventures through an active engagement with Ojibwa values and traditions. I Set in the 1800s during the era of white incursion into the Native American homeland, The Birchbark House chronicles seven-year-old Omakayas’s discovery of her vocation as a healer after she helps nurse her family through a devastating smallpox epidemic. Omakayas learns that she is an adopted child, the survivor of an earlier outbreak of the disease, and that she was saved by a family friend, the mysterious Old Tallow, who serves as an image of female independence and power. In the course of her narrative, then, Omakayas survives a series of demanding ordeals in order to discover a vocation, a mentor, and a new identity. In The Birchbark House the looming threat of white expansion remains muted, allowing Erdrich to describe a relatively self-contained Ojibwa community on the Island of the GoldenBreasted Woodpecker (Madeline Island) in southern Lake Superior. Yet already some alien elements are changing the fabric of daily life. Whites are traveling “in larger numbers . . . to Ojibwa land and setting down their cabins, forts, barns, gardens, pastures, fences, fur-trading posts, churches, and mission schools” (Birchbark 76–77). Whites also bring the deadly disease of smallpox, which ravages the community and eventually kills Omakayas’s baby brother Neewo. Set two years later, The Game of Silence dramatizes an Ojibwa community now under direct attack by the United States government. Invalidating a previous treaty, the government orders the Ojibwe to move west into the land of the Lakota and Dakota tribes—a forced migration that may end in a battle between the tribes. While Omakayas strives to come to terms with her personal destiny, readying herself for a vision from her spirit helper, her community struggles to understand the threats that jeopardize its homeland. By the end of the novel, as the family reluctantly travels west, Omakayas faces the terrible loss of her homeland with a new spirit of adventure. In this

192

Elizabeth Gargano

second novel the white presence has proliferated on Ojibwa land. Omakayas and her cousin Twilight play with a white friend, “Break-Apart Girl,” so named because her cinched corset and voluminous skirts make her look as if she could break apart at the waist. Black-Gown, the Catholic priest, has established a church, and Ojibwa children increasingly attend the school, learning to decipher the “speaking tracks” (Game 131) with which the whites record their treaties and transactions. Working against the traditional linear structures that have shaped so many Western narratives,2 Erdrich divides both novels into four seasonal sections, focusing on each season’s summons to specific tasks, pleasures, and journeys. During the summer, Omakayas’s father, Mikwam, is away hunting and fishing, while the women pursue the all-important work of house building, tanning, and farming. In fall the family harvests wild rice and moves to a sturdy cold-weather cabin. Winter is a season of storytelling and visits, when Mikwam comes home to his family. Spring brings a healing ceremony “to cure winter’s illnesses” (Birchbark 210), the bubbling sweetness of maple sugar, and a renewed sense of life’s possibilities. By subordinating the family’s story to the cyclical narrative of the seasons, Erdrich suggests that human activities can best be understood not as a progressive linear development but rather as a ritual round of profoundly necessary acts that mirror natural processes. Erdrich’s vision is grounded in an all-embracing respect for nature at the heart of Ojibwa culture. Unlike the white settlers with their surprising habit of surrounding their settlements with “mud and garbage” (Game 131), the Ojibwe, Omakayas reflects, “didn’t throw out the same things that the chimookomanag [whites] found useless” (Game 132). Rather than seeing nature as raw material to be utilized and then discarded, Omakayas and her family return what they do not use to its source as an act of homage to nature. After eating fish, for instance, they throw “the spines and bones back into the water. . . . to show respect for the fish so that they would allow people to keep catching them” (Game 72). An Ojibwa understanding of nature not only shapes Erdrich’s deployment of narrative structures. It also permeates her framing of point of view. While both novels generally embrace the view of Omakayas, its child protagonist, the narrative escapes a univocal perspective by slipping into the thoughts of surrounding characters and creatures in order to dramatize motives that Omakayas has refused to envision or understand. Thus, after portraying Omakayas’s anger at her rambunctious brother Pinch, as well as her exultation that he has gotten himself “in trouble” yet again, the narrative shifts briefly to Pinch’s point of view: “It was hard being Big Pinch, harder than his sisters would ever know” (Birchbark 83). Eschewing a conventionally unified point of view, Erdrich stages a single foray into Pinch’s consciousness in order to contextualize Omakayas’s thoughts within a larger familial viewpoint,

Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles

193

demonstrating that her individual perspective is merely a fragment within the overarching mosaic of a larger communal vision. Beyond this, however, Omakayas learns to enter into the realm of nonhuman consciousness. She comes to understand the language of animals, of plants, of ghosts and spirits who speak to her in dreams and through the music of birds. As a future healer, Omakayas also learns to listen to the “bear clan” (Birchbark 207), who, according to her grandmother’s lore, know the medicinal value of forest plants. An individual point of view, Erdrich suggests, can be neither isolated nor owned. Rather, all viewpoints are subtly interconnected. Thus, the “polyvocality” identified by Wong extends well beyond human speech, as Erdrich’s texts also give voice to Omakayas’s powerful animal mentors. II A circular structure and a flexible concept of point of view reinforce Erdrich’s cyclical, communal, and de-individualizing project. Her homage to the Ojibwa story cycle emerges most prominently, however, in her integration of traditional oral tales into Omakayas’s narrative. While Erdrich emphasizes the embedded stories’ separate identity by setting them apart from the surrounding text and assigning them titles, she also dramatizes their impact on the unfolding lives and sensibilities of her characters. Early in The Birchbark House, Mikwam, Omakayas’s father, returns from hunting and trading to tell a tale of being captured by hungry ghosts who planned to devour him. Recounted in a vivid virtuoso style, Mikwam’s tale leaves open the possibility that he is exaggerating and shaping his experience for entertainment value, deploying traditional motifs from his storytelling tradition. In other words, objectivity and accuracy are not the point here; instead, oral storytelling emerges as a collective art that shapes and contextualizes, rather than merely renders, experiences. Furthermore, when shaped into stories, such transformed experiences serve the valuable function of guiding future behavior and events. Soon after Mikwam tells his story, he and his friends discuss the white settlers pouring into Ojibwa territory. Speculating about the whites’ motives, Mikwam’s friend Fishtail asserts: “Before they were born, before they came into this world, the chimookoman [white people] must have starved as ghosts. They are infinitely hungry” (Birchbark 80). Because this new threat to the Ojibwe is contextualized in the language of Mikwam’s story of the spirit world, his narrative sheds light on the realistic events of the novel. Mikwam speculates that his ghostly attackers “had perhaps starved to death and so were eternally hungry.” Failing to perceive Mikwam’s human nature, they identify him as “meat” and argue over which one of them will claim his “bones” (Birchbark 65). In Fishtail’s view the white invaders suffer from a similar obsession, equally deadly. As he exclaims, “Not even when we are gone and they have

194

Elizabeth Gargano

the bones of our loved ones will they be pleased” (Birchbark 80). Prisoners of their own delusion, the invading whites take on the characteristics of living ghosts. They are ready to devour their fellow human beings, driven by their fierce appetite, not for necessary food, but rather for land. Since the concept of the cannibal ghost seamlessly merges sacred realities and daily experience, revealing connections between the powerful world of spirits and the humans who mimic them, Erdrich’s narrative is positioned to draw similar parallels between otherworldly stories and daily life. As such narrative juxtapositions emphasize, oral storytelling is a flexible instrument, capable not only of preserving old meanings but also of generating new ones in order to explain unforeseen experiences. Placing the white invaders within an Ojibwa worldview not only attaches a moral significance to the whites—the “hungry ghosts”; it also offers strategies for resisting and outwitting them. Just as Mikwam uses trickery to escape the ravenous phantoms in his story, so he later tricks a white trader to secure food for his family. An accomplished chess player, Mikwam challenges the trader to play for supplies. Performing poorly at first, he fools the trader into raising the stakes, just as he once duped the hungry ghosts into letting him escape. Mikwam’s victory, when he beats the trader at the white man’s game of chess, is presented as only a brief respite from winter’s trials. Nevertheless, it represents one more victory in the struggle for survival in a hostile world. If the embedded stories provide guidance for characters in the novel, they also provide a subtle form of guidance for readers as well. The tales enable Erdrich to deepen her critique of Euro-American expansion through the interplay of different forms of narration rather than by resorting to explicit didacticism. In even more profound ways, the tales told by Omakayas’s Nokomis, or grandmother,3 signal the integration of daily and sacred experience. Near the beginning of the section entitled “Winter” in The Birchbark House, Nokomis recounts an evocative story from her own childhood. As a young girl she had taken her canoe to the dark side of the lake where the water was deepest, despite her grandfather’s warning never to go there. In this forbidden spot she encounters the ghost of her grandmother, who rises, young and beautiful, from the depths of the lake where she drowned. Later, when the young girl’s grandfather comes in search of her, he rediscovers his lost wife and chooses to follow her into the land of the dead. Like young lovers, the grandparents enter the canoe and “paddle away together, into the darkness” (Birchbark 138). In the face of mortality, loyalty and love forge a sense of continuity that speaks across generations, through the eternal present of storytelling. As the young wife and her old husband vanish into the recesses of Nokomis’s memory, they provide a haunting image of the story’s power to bridge the gap between past and present.

Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles

195

Nokomis’s story not only commemorates those who have died; it also reminds us that life is inextricably intertwined with mortality. Thus, her tale of a ghostly visitor initiates a season of death and dying, as smallpox strikes the village, brought by a “visitor . . . from the mainland” (Birchbark 142). When her family members fall ill and are quarantined in their cabin, Omakayas is left unscathed, living in a temporary bark lodge outside the house of death. Like her great-great-grandfather in Nokomis’s story, however, Omakayas chooses to follow her family into the shadows of death rather than remain safe but alone: “If they were all to die together,” Omakayas reflects, “then let it be so.” (Birchbark 147). Nokomis’s tale of her grandfather’s mysterious reunion with his wife’s ghost embodies the values of courage, loyalty, and devotion—traits that her granddaughter now enacts. Through such stories, generations are linked in an endless chain, and continuity is maintained as a cultural value. In The Game of Silence Nokomis continues to forge stories about her own childhood, inspiring Omakayas to face her fears and take action. In a world where disasters loom, growing up seems a dangerous enterprise. When nine-year-old Omakayas dreads the three- or four-day sojourn in the forest that she must undergo to experience a spirit vision, Nokomis recounts a time when she herself was lost in the woods as a child. In her story, Nokomis encounters a memegwesi, a magical, tiny man with a “little crinkled face” (106). Small as he is, Nokomis nevertheless senses that “there was something huge about him” (Game 106). Soothing her fears of him, the spirit man announces, “I am always around. You just haven’t tracked me before” (Game 107). Like many magical figures, the little man poses a question that sets a test for Nokomis: “You have found me. Now what are you going to do!” (Game 106). When Nokomis makes the right choice, reverently offering the friendly spirit a pinch of tobacco, he rewards her by promising to “[l]ook after you when times are difficult” (Game 107). Nokomis’s reverence for the world of nature and its mysteries pays numerous dividends. First, she experiences a new self-confidence and strength. Later, during a long and hungry winter, the spirit leads her to a secluded spot where a bear is hibernating, providing food for her family.4 Following him into the woods, Nokomis falls to the ground more than once “in [her] . . . weakness.” In fact, she does not discover the bear until she is “nearly at the end of [her] . . . strength” (Game 109). Apparently just a means of passing the time while gathering plants for medicine, Nokomis’s story is also a parable designed to teach her granddaughter strength and endurance. Later Omakayas realizes that “Nokomis told stories for a reason. This one . . . about her helping spirit was a clear message . . . that it was time for Omakayas to seek instruction from her own spirits” (Game 110). Since Omakayas must seclude herself in the woods to make contact with her own spirit helpers,

196

Elizabeth Gargano

the reiterated motif of Nokomis’s willingness to lose herself in the forest is clearly of crucial importance. As a further aid to her granddaughter’s courage, Nokomis creates a song about the memegwesi, who now serves as an internalized emblem of reassurance for Omakayas. Through the song Omakayas is able to retell and re-experience Nokomis’s story when she waits for her spirit vision in the woods. Initially frightened of the spirits she may encounter, she reassures herself by singing Nokomis’s song of the memegwesi: “If she had to see a spirit, Omakayas thought she wouldn’t mind seeing the funny little man whom her grandmother had described” (Game 227). If the tale of the memegwesi gives reassurance when Omakayas faces her ordeal in the woods, it also helps her face an even greater trial: the forced departure of her family for the west. Dismayed that they must leave the memegwesi behind, Omakayas consults Nokomis, who reassures her that “the memegwesiwag have relatives all through this land”: “Perhaps he will send word to his cousins across the bay, perhaps he will ask them to care for these people who must leave their home, perhaps they will be waiting for us, watching over us” (Game 238). Nokomis’s words help Omakayas embark on the family’s forced exile with a “calmer heart” (Game 238). Finally, the reassuring image of the memegwesi returns yet again when Omakayas watches the forest from the family’s departing canoe. In the tree trunks she seems to glimpse “other spirits, good ones, perhaps relatives of Nokomis’s little helper, and she threw her heart out before them” (Game 248). If the reassuring figure of the magical little man has ramifications even beyond Nokomis’s original intentions in creating the story, he also illustrates how the collective voice of the storyteller transcends a merely individual perspective. By retelling Nokomis’s story, Omakayas not only takes on some of her grandmother’s hard-won wisdom, but she also applies the story’s traditional values to new experiences and challenges. III Most crucial to the novel’s project of interweaving sacred significance and daily life are Nokomis’s aadizookaans5 or “teaching stories.” In The Birchbark House Nokomis recounts a traditional Ojibwa sacred story about the cultural hero Nanabozho’s creation of the earth. Enfeebled by the horrendous smallpox epidemic and now on the verge of starvation, Omakayas’s family is renewed and regenerated by Nokomis’s story. Once again, Omakayas herself is inspired to action. In Nokomis’s tale—entitled “Nanabozho and the Muskrat Make an Earth”—repeated rains have covered the earth in water. The magical Nanabozho, “the great teacher of the Ojibwe” (Game 89), is marooned, perched in the highest limb of a pine tree, as the water rises “to his mouth” (Birchbark 172). When Nanabozho asks an otter and a beaver to dive deep and bring up a grain of earth so that he can rebuild the

Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles

197

world, both animals try but fail. Finally, a tiny muskrat succeeds in bringing up five grains of earth, which Nanabozho casts onto the waters to create a new world. Unlike previously discussed stories, which show their human narrators encountering and interacting with inhabitants of the spirit world, the aadizookaan is a seminal sacred story in the Nanabozho cycle. A narrative of origins, it fuses history and religion as it chronicles the epic actions of Nanabozho, an ambiguous figure who exists in many incarnations and embodies conflicting attributes. Erdrich describes him as “the great teacher of the Ojibwas, who used his comical side to teach lessons, often through hilarious mistakes” (Birchbark 243). In the words of Christopher Vecsey, “The Ojibwas viewed [Nanabozho] as a human, manito, hare, wolf, demigod, hero, trickster and buffoon. He was known to take on many forms and many personalities” (85). Vecsey emphasizes that Nanabozho is both a nurturing creator and a cultural hero, protecting the Ojibwa people from such threats as witchcraft and teaching them the principles of medicine and hunting; at the same time, he embodies destructive as well as creative energies. As a trickster, he can challenge, or even threaten, the principles of Ojibwa society (Vecsey 86). Vecsey’s description, of course, is that of an ethnologist, attempting to classify the many appearances of Nanabozho in oral narratives. A different view emerges in the words of Charles Kawbawgam, an eloquent Ojibwa storyteller of the nineteenth century. In the 1890s Kawbawgam narrated numerous Ojibwa tales to Homer Huntingdon Kidder, who recorded and published them. Kawbawgam described Nanabozho this way: [W]e know only that he was a man like ourselves. Yet he had more power than any other Indian; he could speak to the water and make it stop and to the wind and make it talk. He called the animals his brothers; men he called his uncles; women and trees and all that grows and all that flies he called his brothers and sisters. . . . he could do wonders that no other Indian could do. Yet he lived like others; he had a family and camped through the woods, and when there was famine, he went hungry with the rest”. (Kawbawgam 30)

In contrast to Vecsey’s analytical and somewhat fragmented description, Kawbawgam’s is synthetic, emphasizing the unifying thread that runs through Nanabozho’s varied incarnations—his fusion of human and divine attributes. Despite his marvelous powers, he remains associated with, and emblematic of, the human condition. This dual nature is central to an understanding of his life and his story. The sacred figure of Nanabozho is a unifying nexus of oppositions: human and animal, sacred and flawed, intensely powerful but subject to at least some of the conditions of human experience. In Erdrich’s

198

Elizabeth Gargano

narrative storytelling is just such a nexus between oppositional worlds and contradictory impulses. It serves as a gateway between individual experience and collective wisdom. As Erdrich emphasizes, “Omakayas knew that her Nokomis told her this story for a larger reason. . . . She thought many times of the muskrat diving down, down for that little bit of dirt that made the world” (Birchbark 175). Nokomis’s story is both hopeful and challenging. If the tiny muskrat can be instrumental in saving and renewing the world, a child also can make a difference. Weak and hungry, Omakayas is inspired by Nokomis’s tale to leave the cabin in search of food for her family. As Erdrich notes, “this was the first time Omakayas had ventured into the woods since the day she had entered the cabin. On that day, she had followed the sickness inside and determined to do battle with the evil spirit of the disease. Now she decided . . . she would find food” (Birchbark 178). Just as Nokomis’s earlier story forecasts a journey toward darkness and death, so her aadizookaan precipitates Omakayas’s quest for survival and renewal. Tellingly, Nokomis’s story not only inspires Omakayas to seek food for her family; it also, somewhat comically, appears to motivate her pet bird, Andeg, to help out. “As if he had understood Grandma’s story,” Erdrich writes, “Andeg made his own efforts . . . [he] hunted the woods for seeds and nuts [and found] enough to feed the family for a day or two” (Birchbark 175–176). Playful in tone, Erdrich’s depiction of Andeg’s helpfulness also conveys the message that humans and animals communicate in profound and mysterious ways. Andeg not only seeks to feed the family; he also, in a touching but misplaced mating ritual, expresses his love for Omakayas by bringing her twigs to build a nest. In fact, Nokomis’s aadizookaan, or teaching story, underlines the deep links between the human and animal world. A creator who fuses divine and human attributes, Nanabozho cannot remake the lost world without the cooperation of his animal companion, the muskrat, who brings him the necessary five grains of earth. In Nokomis’s tale, the muskrat dives so deep that he drowns and must be revived by Nanabozho’s healing breath. Thus, the humanized Nanabozho and his animal collaborator mutually save each other and together re-create the earth, initiating a cyclical interdependence that will recur throughout history. The parallel is clear when, immediately following the tale, Nokomis dreams of Old Horn—a venerable buck deer—who will sacrifice his life to provide the family with food. She gives Mikwam explicit directions, based on her dream, to locate the deer. Later the family members thank the deer’s spirit, expressing their belief that it lives on in a different form. Nokomis’s aadizookaan not only spurs both humans and animals to concerted action; it also reveals deeper connections between the human and animal realms in order to set in motion a new and redemptive chain of events. Erdrich’s

Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles

199

cyclical narrative, then, enacts the mysterious processes that it describes. Plot is equivalent to the profound patterning of nature. Stories generate dreams, visions, and even external events. Like The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence also builds up to a climactic aadizookaan that both teaches Omakayas about her cultural history and shapes her future behavior in profound ways. Nokomis’s story “The Little Girl and the Wiindigoo” (Game 159) recounts the experience of an orphaned girl ignored by her community until they find themselves under attack by a giant wiindigoo, a “terrible monster of the ice and snow” (Game 159). A wise old man suggests a solution: everyone will try to smoke a magical pipe, and only the person who can “get it to light without a match will be the one with the strength to fight the wiindigoo” (Game 161). Although the bravest warriors are unable to breathe fire into the pipe, the motherless girl, with the help of the “spirit who was looking after her” (162–163), causes the pipe to glow with fire at her touch. Having lit the magical pipe, the girl becomes wise and “powerful” (163): she allows the cold to fill her until she grows “into a giant” (Game 163) and then fights a “terrible raging battle” (164) with the wiindigoo, “a huge man-shaped thing white as frost” (163). After killing the monster, the girl shares some hot tallow soup with him, prying open his icy, jagged teeth and pouring the broth down his throat. Released from the terrible spell of the winter frost, she and the wiindigoo return to normal size, and he is revealed as an ordinary man. Generously, the tribe never tells him that he had become a wiindigoo but instead enjoins him to hunt for the little girl, his savior, providing her with food for the rest of her life. Nokomis’s story makes use of the traditional figure of the wiindigoo in order to inspire her granddaughter to trust her own powers. Eternally hungry, the wiindigoo haunts the winter landscape in times of famine and feasts on human flesh. A complex and multilayered concept, the wiindigoo evokes numerous significances. In her glossary at the end of the novel, Erdrich characterizes it as “a giant monster of Ojibwa teachings, often made of ice and associated with the starvation and danger of deep winter” (Game 256). In Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes, Christopher Vecsey defines the wiindigoo as “a giant cannibal made of ice, symbolizing winter and starving times” (77). Vecsey describes the wiindigoo as a single powerful manito; yet, as he points out, lesser wiindigoos also appear in Ojibwa tales as magical beings who embody traits of their powerful namesake. In The Birchbark House, for instance, Omakayas imagines “the icy breath of giant windigos striding over the ground, cracking trees off with every foot crunch” (13).6 Insidiously, the wiindigoo spirit can take possession of human beings in times of famine, causing them to perceive their fellow humans as food. Possessed by the wiindigoo spirit or maddened by starvation, these human wiindigoos may be driven by their fatal hunger to destroy other human beings.

200

Elizabeth Gargano

Nokomis’s wiindigoo tale affirms the ability of a small girl to rescue her community from the deadly personification of winter. Later in the novel, Omakayas finds herself able to perform a similar feat. When guiding BlackGown, the Catholic priest, to visit his parishioners in another village, Mikwam becomes trapped on an island of ice in the midst of the now-thawing lake. Unaware of his whereabouts, the family is frightened and distraught until Nokomis brings out the pipe that she saves for special sessions of meditation, reflection, and prayer. The whole family smokes the pipe; afterwards Omakayas has a vivid dream of her father’s whereabouts, enabling a search party to locate and save him and Black-Gown from the deadly ice and snow. Like the girl in Nokomis’s story, Omakayas is empowered by the magic pipe to defeat the terrible wiindigoo of “deep winter” with its threat of “starvation” and “danger.” On his return home, Mikwam tells his own heroic story of endurance on a spar of ice. As he explains, he and the priest argued about the relative power of their gods to rescue them. Inspired by a traditional sacred story, Omakayas’s dream validates Mikwam’s side of the argument. Later, Mikobines, a wise older man of the village, reminds Omakayas that the source of her magical dream lies outside of herself in “Gizhe Manidoo” (Game 221), “the great kind spirit” (Game 253) who watches over the Ojibwe: “Gizhe Manidoo gave you a very great gift, but you must remember that this gift does not belong to you. This gift is for the good of your people” (Game 221). Based on a traditional, sacred story, Omakayas’s dream is also a narrative, one that ultimately produces a happy ending for the chilling tale of entrapment on the ice that Mikwam will later recount. If Mikwam’s story ends happily, Omakayas also recognizes that there is no real end to the storytelling process. In fact, her ultimate accomplishment in The Game of Silence is her own realization that she too is a storyteller, producing new variations on traditional themes. In a prescient vision of her future life, she sees herself as an old woman rich in experience, recounting stories to her grandchildren: “the vision she received and the stories she told, the scenes of emotion, good and bad, that she endured, was the story of her life” (Game 232). Here, Omakayas’s experiences throughout a long life are described not as events but rather as “stories” shaped by the narrative techniques and cultural values of the traditional teller of oral tales. A continuing controversy has surrounded Erdrich’s fiction for adult readers. While some readers, such as the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, have faulted her for focusing on supposedly assimilated Native American characters, others have seen Erdrich’s fiction as a moving record of Ojibwa history and culture. In The Birchbark House Erdrich eschews an assimilationist approach, but she suggests ways that all readers can enter her text more deeply, offering subtle linkages between event and narrative that evoke a complex Ojibwa worldview. In sum, Erdrich pays her child-readers the ultimate

Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles

201

compliment: rather than adapting her cultural content to an easily accessible linear structure, she opens the door on a richly patterned, profoundly mysterious world—one that readers themselves must strive to experience. Structuring her novel around storytelling motifs and tropes that illuminate the surrounding action, Erdrich requires her audience to read actively. According to Catherine Rainwater, Erdrich’s adult novels serve as “ethnoÂ� semiotic encounters” (145). Foregrounding the techniques of oral storytelling, they foster the “self-conscious accommodation of cultural outsiders in the audience, and thus” convert the “‘reader’ to [a] ‘listener’” (145). In Rainwater’s view, “written storytelling is directed to an absent audience” (147). In contrast, orality emphasizes the audience’s presence. By dramatizing the process of oral storytelling and the characters’ direct and immediate responses to individual tales, Erdrich models how readers, both children and adults, can read and interÂ�act with Omakayas’s story. By including a glossary of Ojibwa terms at the end of her novel, Erdrich invites children of all backgrounds to share in the riches of her narrative, an impulse also affirmed in a prefatory note to readers: “Dear reader, when you speak this name out loud [Omakayas] you will be honoring the life of an Ojibwa girl who lived long ago” (Birchbark “Thanks and Acknowledgements”). At the same time, Erdrich’s deftly orchestrated novel does not allow cultural outsiders the comfortable illusion that we now “understand” the Ojibwa experience; instead, it invites us to become more aware of our relation to another culture and to engage with that culture in the context of a complex and troubled history.

No t e s 1. In her essay “Child Crusaders: The Literature of Global Childhood,” Makman explores the empowering nature of children’s work in cultures that integrate such work into the fabric of daily life. 2. William J. Scheick implicitly refers to the mainstream Western narrative tradition when he argues that Erdrich’s fictional works for adults “lack a conventional structure comprised of a beginning, middle and end” and that their interconnected stories “never neatly integrate, never become a satisfying whole” (17). As Scheick goes on to suggest, readers with conventional expectations must “mentally process their discontent with” what they take to be an “absence of a satisfying integration of character identity and of overall narrative design” (118). Scheick’s reading of Erdrich’s work is in many respects both appreciative and thoughtful, but he ignores the fact that the oral story cycle, the narrative model for much of Erdrich’s fiction, embodies not a “lack” of “narrative design” but simply a different concept of design—one that values both multiplicity and variation. As they learn to seek for connections between diverse and distinct tales, experienced listeners and storytellers help to construct a larger story whose significance remains fluid, mysterious, and shifting, allowing for new insights and discoveries.

202

Elizabeth Gargano

3. Throughout the novel, Erdrich assigns no name to Omakayas’s grandmother but instead chooses to refer to her by the Ojibwa name for “grandmother.” Following her, I do the same in this article. 4. In this second encounter the memegwesi initially disguises himself as a speaking rabbit, demanding that Nokomis follow his tracks. Typifying an Ojibwa perspective, this transformation not only emphasizes the magical nature of the spirit helper but also suggests that distinctions between human beings and the animal world are shifting and permeable. 5. Erdrich explains in her note on the Ojibwa language that the novel involves, for her, the work of recovering and presenting an oral language in written form. Reflecting the fluidity of the recovery process, her two novels about Omakayas employ variant spellings of some Ojibwa words: “adisokaan” in The Birchbark House and “aadizookaan” in The Game of Silence; “windigo” in The Birchbark House and “wiindigoo” in The Game of Silence. Unless quoting directly from The Birchbark House, I use the spellings in the second novel. 6. As indicated in a previous note, Erdrich uses different variants of the word “wiindigoo” in The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence.

Wor k s Ci t e d Chavkin, Alan, and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Erdrich, Louise. The Birchbark House. New York: Hyperion, 1999. ——— . The Game of Silence. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Kawbawgam, Charles. Ojibwa Narratives of Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jacques LePique. Ed. Arthur P. Bourgeois. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Makman, Lisa Hermien. “Child Crusaders: The Literature of Global Childhood.” The Lion and the Unicorn 26.3 (2002): 287–304. Rainwater, Catherine. “Ethnic Signs in Erdrich’s Tracks and The Bingo Palace.” The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Ed. Alan Chavkin. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 144–160. Ruppert, James. “Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Love Medicine.” North Dakota Quarterly 59 (1991): 229–242. Scheick, William J. “Narrative and Ethos in Erdrich’s ‘A Wedge of Shade.’” The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Ed. Alan Chavkin. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 117–129. Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf.” Impact/Albuquerque Journal Magazine, 8 Oct. 1986: 10–11. Reprinted in Studies in American Literature 10 (1986): 177–184. Thompson, Melissa Kay. “A Sea of Good Intentions: Native American Books for Children.” The Lion and the Unicorn 25.3 (2001): 353–374. Vecsey, Christopher. Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983. Wong, Hertha D. “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Narrative Communities and the Short Story Sequence.” Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Ed. Gerald Kennedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 170–193.

C aroline W igginton

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration in the Petitions of Samson Occom

O

n March 7, 1994, the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut gained U.S. federal recognition of their tribal status after an almost twenty-year legal battle. As part of the recognition process, the Mohegan tribe needed to demonstrate continuous political influence or authority over its members.1 Until the 1700s, the Mohegan tribe was governed by a sachem who was advised by other tribal members. However, prompted by colonists’ corruption of the sachemship during this period, the tribe transitioned to a less vulnerable, informal authority, one not clearly embodied by a governing group or individual. In articles and legal documents, Mohegan tribal historian Melissa Fawcett-Sayet refers to this authority as sociocultural. This authority became vested in a long lineage of tribal Medicine Women who helped the Mohegans transmit history and culture as well as govern their community. In order to demonstrate continuous political influence or authority, the Mohegan tribe needed to prove a link between the easily substantiated sachemship and the more subtle sociocultural leadership. The Mohegan Samson Occom (1723–1792) partially fulfilled this link. Occom was both a member of the outlawed Mohegan Leadership Council and a Christian missionary. He served his community and other Indian tribes politically and culturally, and therefore he embodies—for legal purposes—the transition from one leadership form to the other. As a writer of letters, hymns, prose, diaries, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 20, Number 4 (Winter 2008): pp. 24–55. Copyright © 2008 University of Nebraska Press.

203

204

Caroline Wigginton

anthropological essays, sermons, and petitions, Occom left a large, tangible archive of his political and sociocultural leadership, documents that became evidence in the legal case two hundred years later. Today Occom is known in scholarly communities principally for a sermon published in 1772 and a more recently recovered autobiographical narrative from 1768. Though many scholars consider him to be the first Native author to publish in the English language, his petitions have remained relatively unstudied. In addition to being part of the legal presence of the 1990s, these petitions also performed political and sociocultural work on behalf of the Mohegans and other tribes in the coastal area of New York and Connecticut during the 1700s. Through these petitions, Occom expresses Native determination to survive as nations. He articulates the ways in which Indigenous nations have chosen to continue as communities under the pressure of colonialism. With these petitions, he placed his literacy at the service of his fellow Indians to regenerate community. This regeneration occurs through the process of the petitions’ construction and through embodying the process after the fact, thereby healing rifts within and between communities and extending tribal networks. In the devastation of the colonial world, the petitions create an Indian world out of the past and present, a patchwork of traditions, adaptations, and simulations that becomes real during the very act of writing. Occom’s petitions include internal records that document tribal decisions and external records that communicate requests to the colonial governments. Though legal petitions are a nontraditional genre for literary studies, these petitions are more than historical or even legal documents; they are concrete moments of intellectual sovereignty. Beyond the ostensibly clearcut requests of the documents, petitions crafted by Occom in conjunction with Native communities provide a rich site for cultural and literary analysis. Occom’s knowledge of his own community, other tribes, Native traditions, Christianity, and white culture converge to create many layers of meaning. The colonial world placed strong emphasis upon the power of written language, a fact repeatedly underscored by whites’ reliance upon treaties and documents to enforce encroachment and other acts of colonization. At the same time, Mohegan language had ritualistic power.2 The act of speaking can make things happen.3 Since they use written language to perform decisions made by Indian communities through oral language, the petitions merge these two effects of language. By doing so, they demonstrate intellectual sovereignty, claim literacy’s power as their own, and infuse Native ritual into white and Native archives. In other words, Occom’s petitions are written utterances of self-determining communities and enactments of their perseverance. Significantly, these documents continue to demand and execute sovereignty because they resonate beyond their moment of creation into the future and continue

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

205

to establish a self-governing community for the Mohegan tribe, perhaps most tangibly in the legal process of tribal recognition. The power that Native communities claim through petitions did not reverse colonists’ dominance. These documents did not force the whites to acknowledge the Mohegan Leadership Council or pay them pasturage rents or give the Brotherton tribe a grist mill, all requests in Occom’s petitions. Even when the petitions resulted in gaining some concession from whites, the request was almost always practical and demonstrated some Native adaptation to the colonial world’s material existence. Instead, the petitions claimed and continue to claim the power of survival plus resistance, what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.” For Vizenor, survivance is “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence” (Fugitive Poses 15). Through these petitions, Natives assert their active presence. They assert the existence of community governance bodies that make decisions. They assert their continued occupation of the land and their desire to participate as sovereign nations in the economy. They assert their physical needs. They assert their own relationship to traditional religion and a Christianity that is not mediated by white missionaries. They assert their intellectual right to tell their own stories. They assert their ability to construct their own versions of history.4 In focusing on survivance within the petitions instead of the results of the petitions, I believe we must not treat them as literal snapshots of the communities. Survivance involves “simulations” that “contravene the absence of the real with theatrical performances; the theater of tribal consciousness is the recreation of the real, not the absence of the real in the simulations of dominance” (Vizenor, Manifest Manners 5). We cannot judge the petitions on how well they confirm our personal or collective understanding of authentic “Indianness.” Doing so reinforces the myth of the vanishing Indian since, as James Clifford writes, authenticity forces Indians to remain “tied to traditional pasts, inherited structures that either resist or yield to the new but cannot produce it” (5). The simulations of survivance involve “strategic accommodations” (9) in which peoples “invent local futures” (5). Even the word “assimilation” resembles “simulation,” its accommodations potentially containing the trickiness and creative power of survivance. A search for cultural authenticity is particularly destructive to an analysis of petitions written by Occom, a Christian missionary. He crafted the language and selected the images, thereby exposing the petitions to the same criticism leveled at Occom himself. Though they are community documents and extensions of the nations upon whose behalf they were written, they are also distinct manifestations of Occom’s authorial consciousness. His voice becomes increasingly strong throughout his years as petition writer and community leader, sometimes overpowering the tribal voice. Even if we focus less

206

Caroline Wigginton

on the language and more on tribal ownership, we can still imagine Occom greatly influencing the decisions made by the tribes and their subsequent interÂ�actions with whites. They would have built upon Occom’s familiarity with Euroamericans and their culture. The tight linkage between the petitions and Occom’s identity requires a focus on survivance instead of resistance when studying the texts in order to ensure a nuanced analysis. Resistance would focus on the results of the petitions and view Occom as a failure, a Christian missionary who surrendered to Euroamerican culture and persuaded others to do the same. The petitions would be sad reminders of that failure, either elegies to some last pure-but-frail moment or insidious extensions of the spread of assimilation. Survivance recognizes the intellectual right of Occom and other Natives to convert to Christianity and to combine Native traditions with Christianity without diminishing their cultural sovereignty. Survivance recognizes the beauty of their practicality. These recognitions do not erase the fact that some of Occom’s decisions were destructive to traditional modes of life or that other Natives’ decisions required different adaptations or that some Natives refused to adapt at all. Acknowledging sovereignty also acknowledges that we may personally condemn the sacrifices that Occom made to Christianity. This essay analyzes how Occom worked with tribal communities to envision Indianness and how they enacted that vision in order to regenerate communities and networks that were crumbling under the stress of colonialism. In doing so, I will show that these petitions use written English to regenerate Native communities, and I will outline the types of community Occom and his fellow Natives imagined through these petitions. Fortunately, the choices made by Occom were conducive to producing an archive. They give scholars a chance to analyze one route of survivance and, more importantly, provide the Mohegan tribe with documents to assist in maintaining cultural continuity and gaining federal recognition. Though the focus of this article is upon survivance performed and documented by Occom’s petitions, I have the parallel purpose of extending our understanding of Occom as a writer. Occom used language to materially affect and serve his community. His service through literacy did not stop with petitions; it also included his sermons, hymns, letters, and other prose. In That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community, Jace Weaver argues that Occom as well as other Native authors perform “communitism,” a term he forms by combining “the words ‘community’ and ‘activism’” (xiii). He believes that the promotion of “communitist values means to participate in the healing of the grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities and the pained individuals in them” (xiii). Examining Occom’s petitions expands our understanding of how Occom used writing to perform communitism. For Weaver, writing is Occom’s

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

207

only available tool for “promoting communitist values” (46). Because Occom’s work has been mostly unpublished and only available in scattered archives, Weaver limits his analysis to the two published works and some letter fragments included within other scholars’ publications.5 The published form of the autobiographical narrative that Weaver used lacked a crucial introductory statement by Occom about the circumstances of its writing. Weaver’s focus on this small portion of Occom’s writing leads him to conclude that Occom’s writing promotes communitism mostly by “critiquing the White power structure of his day” and that Occom was a “marginal figure” within that structure (46). Expanding the analysis to include petitions reveals a larger intent than critique. First, the documents are specifically directed toward materially changing the Indian world, typically by either appealing for a desired response from white audiences or by textually inscribing concerns and beliefs. Second, by physically writing the petitions, Occom used the increasing importance of documents to prolong sovereignty in an emerging print culture and placed even his “marginal” critiques within a broader context. Third, communitism occurred in the very act of creating the petitions. In concert with these tribes, Occom helped heal communities by binding over the wounds of colonialism as best he could. Weaver believes that Occom “could not hope to reach a wide Native audience,” though the petitions’ audience works differently than the audiences for his sermon, autobiographical narrative, and letters (49). The Native audience after production may not have been wide, but the petitions are a result of preproduction community discussions and decisions. The moment and circumstances of generation must be imagined in order to reveal that the writing itself is communitism. Occom’s education and experiences as a Christian missionary provided him with many of the tools with which he served his tribe and larger Indian community.6 His youth was spent in a context of tribal factionalism and land loss, largely the result of rifts caused by colonial corruption of the sachemship. In order to fight encroachment upon its land and sovereignty, the Mohegan tribe found itself reliant upon whites to act on its behalf within the colonial courts. As a well-educated Christian missionary, literate in both the English language and white colonial culture, Occom could alleviate tribal dependency on non-Mohegans, thus beginning to heal deeper rifts within the tribal structure. His missionary work also trained him as a leader and helped to reaffirm the tribal networks that had weakened under colonialism. Bernd Peyer points out that many of Occom’s duties performed within other tribal communities (helping with planting and harvesting, advising) were those “normally ascribed to sachems” and made it “quite natural for him to resume the responsibilities of a councilor upon his return to Mohegan” (66, 72). As a missionary, Occom traveled among various tribes and frequently

208

Caroline Wigginton

returned home to Mohegan land. Lisa Brooks asserts that Occom gained a “reputation as a stirring preacher amongst the [coastal tribal community] network’s inhabitants [and . . .] as a leader who strengthened the relationships between them” (101). Both Brooks and Peyer suggest that missionary work was an extension of Mohegan traditions for Occom, a modern way to serve Indian communities as a leader in a world in which Christianity and education were tools frequently necessary for survival. In American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures, Joanna Brooks addresses how African Americans and Natives used Christianity to variously transform their communities during this period, greatly influenced by the period’s religious revivals. The “pioneering contributions” of Occom and other writers of color answer “the alienating and mortifying effects of slavery, colonialism, and racial oppression” with the “religious formulas such as conversion, revival, and resurrection” (9). Rejecting the “assimilationist, syncretist, [and] hybridity models” for viewing his conversion and focusing on his “self-determination,” Brooks analyzes Occom’s Christianity generally and his hymnody specifically (56). Critics looking for evidence of resistance in Occom’s religious conversion sometimes misinterpret his Christianity and regard it at best as a way of hiding continuing Native religion and at worst as a betrayal of his fellow Indians.7 Occom’s faith was deep and sincere, not a guise for traditional religion. Occom’s newfound faith merged with his faith in tribal communities. As I will show, Christianity was how Occom chose to perform communitism, not how he assimilated himself and other Natives to whiteness. To that end, his interpretation of Christianity both incorporated traditional Native elements and developed an increasingly Native-centric understanding of salvation. Occom’s Early Petitions Occom’s first efforts at petition writing were on behalf of his own tribe. In 1764 Occom inscribed a petition from the Mohegan Tribe to Sir William Johnson. In 1763–1764 members of Ben’s Town and John’s Town came together in response to sachem Ben III’s abuse of tribal lands and resources.8 They determined to govern the Mohegans through a council consisting of various heads of the tribe. In this 1764 petition, the council informs Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs for North America and also a “trusted friend and advisor” of Occom (Occom 141), about various grievances against Ben III and of their right to remove Ben III as sachem. This petition, written in Occom’s hand and signed by the Mohegan tribe, declares sovereignty and unity as well as acts as a performative utterance. Up until this time, Occom had aligned himself with the Ben III faction of the tribe. In writing a petition in his own hand, Occom can no longer deny

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

209

his new allegiance. He received criticism for his involvement with the new council from Ben III and various colonials, including his employers. By both writing and signing the “Mohegan Tribe to Sir William Johnson” petition, Occom recognizes his leadership role. It is a personal and public declaration in a medium recognized by his Euroamerican mentors and employers. Even though Occom took on a sachemlike role through his missionary work, here he writes on behalf of the Mohegan tribe and not on behalf of himself or a sachem. This difference is an acknowledgment that the old way of leadership by an individual no longer works for the tribe since the colonial government took advantage of that method of governance. As Melissa Fawcett-Sayet points out in her essay titled “Sociocultural Authority: The Mohegan Case,” “non-Indian governing bodies” manipulate and silence “political rulers” (52). Thus, sociocultural leaders are more able to “persevere” under colonialism (52). Though Occom sat on the Leadership Council, he is a link within the sociocultural chain through also being a minister to the Mohegan people as well as an author of hymns. Further, retaining power within the hands of a single leader would leave both the leader himself and the tribe as a whole vulnerable to concerted efforts by the whites to steal Native land and demolish tribal structures.9 Within the petition, Occom writes in the style and language of the traditional humble petition writer. He opens with a section acknowledging the position and power of his addressee before turning to the body and requests of the petition. Throughout the petition, but especially in the opening section, he uses the trope of the “poor Indian.” As Joanna Brooks notes in her introduction to the petitions, opening postures of “supplication” can be read as “strategic appeals to Euro-American rhetorical customs, or as manipulations of the trope of the poor Indian that was a mainstay of Anglo-American colonial discourse” (144). Occom does both. Occom’s use of humility in personal letters to his mentor and former teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, demonstrates his use of simulation in order to create a real presence. In these letters, even at his angriest, Occom continues to sign in the conventional humble manner, giving lip service to the poor Indian trope and obeying eighteenth-century letter-writing customs. In a 1771 letter in which he angrily censures Wheelock for moving his Connecticut “alma Mater” of Moor’s Indian Charity School to New Hampshire, where it “will be too alba mater to Suckle the Tawnees, for She is already aDorn’d up too much like the Popish Virgin Mary” (98), Occom still closes by signing “your most unworthy Servt, Samson Occom” (100). As in this example, Occom’s epistolary closing flatteries and self-deprecations contrast with and highlight his anger, thus revealing the “poor Indian” type to be mere simulation. He replaces it with a sovereign Indian antitype who has control over

210

Caroline Wigginton

himself. Instead of showing obeisance, these moments are individual declarations of sovereignty. As the product of a younger and less disillusioned Occom, the petition’s humble opening does similar work, although the contrast between the opening and the body, where the petition declares the Mohegan right to remove sachems who are acting unlawfully, is less crisp and dramatic than in Occom’s private letters to Wheelock. Yet despite the humble tone, the petition does not ask permission to remove Ben III. Instead, it declares the right of the Mohegans to do so by Mohegan “Law” and “Custom” (145). By combining “humility” with a “sense of grievance,” Occom produces what David Murray refers to as the “sting in the tail” (53). However, since Johnson was Occom’s friend, he would have been more likely to hear the irony embedded in the deferential tone and language. Using the “poor Indian” trope stages two simulations that are dependent upon the white audience’s reception. Either the whites would take the humility at face value and be manipulated by Occom’s deft handling of Euroamerican rhetorical expectations, or the whites would experience the contrast between the tone and actual declaration of rights. In either case, the Indian voice of the petition defies white expectations even as it acknowledges them. Murray points out that “[i]rony is notoriously difficult to pin down, of course, and for that reason profoundly subversive of any attempt at controlling the play of meanings in any discourse” (53). In his letters and autobiography, Occom frequently “moves himself in and out of the stereotype of the poor Indian” (54). Here Occom moves the petition’s voice in and out of that stereotype as well, allowing the words to act as rhetorical pricks that irk but that cannot be punished since acknowledging them would be a recognition of intellectual sovereignty. When read unironically and combined with frequent references to whites’ paternal duties to their Indian children, the humility potentially maneuvers the audience into a sense of responsibility and guilt. These Indians know the expected format of a petition, they use that format, but they do not undercut their key message even as they proffer the necessary humility. Whether or not Johnson and the colonial government respected the Mohegans’ assertion of sovereignty, the careful use of language, its razorlike precision, embodies the energy of survivance. Occom’s editorial insertion of the phrase “the Miserable Nations of the Land” builds upon the humble tone (144). The phrase further combines a double meaning of miserable—subordinate and oppressed—with a reminder of both sovereignty and sheer numbers through the use of “Nations.” The phrase itself enacts a transformation from performing the “poor Indian” to declaring strength. After all, as Astrid Wind points out, the colonists were continually aware of the possibility of a large pan-Indian uprising; the various tribes had over 35,000 warriors at their potential disposal east of the

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

211

Mississippi (45). Though the colonial government certainly felt more secure after successfully winning the Pequot War and putting down Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, continually fighting wars was expensive. By declaring overwhelming presence, this reminder of numbers denies the myth of the vanishing Indian. Occom repeatedly emphasizes the Mohegans’ active presence in the territory through other imagery as well. For example, in the main body of the petition, Occom accuses the colonial overseers of desiring “to root us out of our land ^root & Branch^” (7).10 Even as the image accuses, it reasserts Native persistence. Occom supplants the first “root” of removal by repeating the word but using an alternate meaning. The second “root” is a noun, unlike the first “root,” which is a verb, and thus the part of speech being used is no longer an action and is instead something unmoving and embedded, just as the image implies that the Mohegan people are more deeply embedded than the colonial invaders. The fixedness of the community is then further present through its branches, visible above the ground and extending outwards. Lisa Brooks sees this image as a crafted denial of the “developing mythology of the vanishing Indian” that replaces that myth with a vision of a “living and growing community” (111). The image itself is a performative utterance because it linguistically connects the document to the Mohegan community. Mohegan tribal historian Melissa Jayne Fawcett notes that the “Sacred Tree, or Tree of Life is the spiritual entity that connects one generation to the next. With root deeply embedded in the earth and the bodies of the ancestors, its branches reach towards the sky and future generations” (37). According to Fawcett, Medicine Woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon and Tribal Council Member Jayne Fawcett believe that the Sacred Tree and other oral traditions “serve to confirm the existence of a religious symbolic art tradition” (38). Occom’s use of that imagery adds symbolic depth to the petition and underscores the petition’s importance not only within the colonial legal system but also within the Mohegan tradition, making the petition a physical embodiment of community regeneration both in terms of describing that regeneration and in terms of manifesting that regeneration.11 Occom had also recently returned from a missionary assignment to Oneida territory. While there he was likely exposed to the complex and rich tradition of Iroquois diplomacy. In their guide to The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, Francis Jennings et al. provide a glossary of treaty symbolism. The tree is “an important symbol of peace and protection. The celestial tree stood at the center of the earth and extended its branches and roots everyÂ� where” (122). The root and branch image therefore connects Occom and the Mohegan tribe pantribally, a historic tactic of strength for Native communities, both before and after contact.12

212

Caroline Wigginton

Finally, the root and branch metaphor, occurring frequently in the Old and New Testaments, also has biblical underpinnings. As a Christian missionary, Occom had been educated in biblical scholarship while at Moor’s and continued to use specific stories to craft his sermons.13 For the particular use found in this petition, a possible reference is Malachi 4:1, where the prophet states that “all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.” Malachi writes to reassure the Israelites who have returned to Judea after captivity but continue to live a harsh existence. In referring to this image, Occom associates Mohegan territorial sovereignty with religious rights: Mohegan territory is their promised land, not the colonists’. Mohegans have more right to the land through both genealogy and spirituality. By combining Mohegan religious symbolism with Iroquois diplomacy and Christian metaphor, Occom performs a powerful act of communitism just within this single image. Not only do the words establish Mohegan tribal history and presence, but they also create a particularly Mohegan form of Christianity, one that Occom clearly envisions as a healing path for his community and other tribes. By traveling and serving other tribes as a missionary, Occom also spreads this Native Christianity, again as a healing path. While the colonial imposition of Christianity on Native peoples certainly led to cultural destruction for Indigenous communities, a process within which Occom is implicated, Occom spread an Indigenous Christianity instead of simply colonialism in religious form. The many layers of the root and branch image would not have been transparent to Johnson. But the purpose of the document is not simply to communicate with Johnson. After long years of factionalism, including the geographic splitting into two towns, the convergence of historically opposing parties under the goal of survivance asserts a new, singular Mohegan identity. The crafting of language within the petition has the feel of ritual and underscores the momentousness of this convergence. The sense of ritualistic language, most of which would only be visible to someone deeply familiar with the Mohegan cultural and oral tradition, further appears when Occom writes of wanting to “render us as Cyphers in our own land” (145). Though the ostensible meaning of “Cyphers” within this context charges the colonists with making the Mohegans worth nothing, the word “Cypher” has a second meaning and points to Mohegan code language within the petition. Though the Mohegans perform humility, the petition as a whole is an encoded act of survivance, one that is transparent to the community but not to the white audience. Additionally, this word implies that the whites cannot understand Mohegan language even translated to English. The petition asserts a cultural

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

213

identity that is more intelligent, more rhetorically savvy, than its audience and that is the product of a single community. These individual linguistic components combined with the message of the petition itself work in concert to produce a healing of the tribal rift begun with the split under different sachems. Though holdouts remained, the act of writing the petition brought the community together. The petition remains as an embodiment of its regenerative purpose. In tandem with the 1764 petition to Sir William Johnson, two petitions written by Occom on behalf of the Tribal Council in the following decade provide an internally directed approach to using petitions as performative utterances for enacting communitism and survivance. These petitions document council agreements. They are “Mohegan Tribe Standing Agreements” (1773) and “Mohegan Tribe on Rents” (1778). Though found among Occom’s papers and written in his handwriting, the documents are not signed by Occom or by anyone else. The absence of his signature places them within the Native political tradition of seeking consensus and shows the emerging understanding that leadership spread over a group is less easily undermined by colonial governments. The petitions announce a cohesiveness of leadership and community that denies the history of tribal factionalism. They frequently refer to unanimous decisions and make clear that the decisions and principles are on behalf of the entire Mohegan community, “one Family,” acting to textually heal rifts (141). For example, “Mohegan Tribe Standing Agreements” delineates six principles for governing community grazing lands: 1. Unanimously Agreed, that none of us as individuals Shall ever take any English Creatures into our Common Pastures or into the general Fields, for the Future, If we Take in any, it Shall be for the Whole Tribe, and the owners of the Creatures, Shall pay the Tribe in Making Stone Walls around the general Fields The Reasons—If We Shoud let individuals Take in Creatures, every one will take in as many as they please, Squaws and all, and our Fields and Pastures woud be Crouding^ed^ full every Year and We Shoud never have feed for our own Creatures— 2. Any one may let out his or her Planting or Mowing Ground upon Shares or other Wise, for a ^Summer^ Season, but not take in Creatures to feed it, in the fall,— 3. Any one may hire out his own House and inclosed Lots, Provided the Tenant keeps within his Limitts,— 4. that as there will be always some [page torn]ing Timber

214

Caroline Wigginton

and Saw Mill Logs, Such Tops will be for the Whole Tribe, they may Cut them for their own fires, or Cut them into Cordwood to Sell to the White People, allowing the Tribe one Shilling for every Cord they Sell—None Shall Sell any Wood, without any Liberty from any Wood the Tribe and the Overseers 5. if any one is Short of Winder Fod[d]er, and is obligd to put ^out^ his Cattle to the White People to be kept, he may pay in Summer feed in our Common Pastures, but if he falls Short, by Selling his foder, he Shant be allowd to take in Creatuers into our Common Pastures, he must pay other Wise— 6. If any one or a number fence in a bit of ground in any of our Common Pastures to Plant or Sowe, he or they Shall make good Fence, and if any Damage is done by our Creatures in them they Shall recover no Damages,— (146)

Occom wrote this petition on behalf of the “Heads of the Tribe” who continued to meet and decide tribal affairs even though Connecticut would not recognize a nontribally chosen sachem, Zachary Johnson (146). This petition enacts Mohegan sovereignty by repeatedly asserting tribal cohesiveness both as a decision-making body and as a body occupying land as a community. It participates in a continuous confirmation of the community regeneration enacted within the 1764 petition to Johnson. In contrast to the humility of the 1764 petition, this petition opens with a straightforward statement: “The Heads of the Tribe met to Consult our Mohegan affairs” (146). In using the word “Heads,” Occom and his fellow Mohegans are reaffirming and legitimating a group leadership, a sovereign right as well as a transformation of past leadership strategies that had most recently enabled colonial manipulation and usurpation. By using “Tribe” instead of “Mohegans,” the opening line also indicates that there is one community. This linguistic statement of unity is echoed through the remainder of the petition. The heads affirm that the rules are “Unanimously Agreed” and repeatedly refer to the “Whole Tribe,” thus further indicating that they are disclaiming factionalism and unifying the tribe (146). Mohegan sovereignty and survival depend upon the ability to retain and control land. This petition unquestioningly asserts the right to control Mohegan grazing lands and places Mohegan interests and access over both individual Mohegan and white desires, a particularly Native view of land. This petition further requires Mohegans to charge whites for usage of grazing lands or timber and to return some of that money to the tribe. In the past, wampum had been used to establish and maintain trade networks among

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

215

the various coastal tribes. By requiring whites to pay for usage, the petition attempts to force whites to act within a trade network whereby Mohegans are a tribe, a unity. The petition is part of a process of continually reestablishing Mohegan tribal identity and attempting to require whites to interact with the tribe as a community. It is also a recognition of a changing world, one in which agriculture, though perhaps not traditionally done by men and perhaps not the traditional foundation of the tribe, was also recognized by the colonial government and the rhetoric of Christian civilization as a sign of sovereign right to the land. Putting in place methods for governing agricultural commerce, especially commerce with whites, is a practical manifestation of survivance. This practicality further appears in the petitioners’ writing down of these rules and creation of a physical archive and evidence of tribal identity. After all, as undeniably learned in a decades-long land-restoration case against Connecticut during the 1700s, white courts often require documents as evidence. By writing down the rules, the tribe can use the document in getting reparations from whites who use tribal lands without appropriately compensating the community. Occom’s Later Petitions By 1785 Occom had become increasingly disillusioned with the white communities with which he negotiated and interacted. Occom and several other Algonquian missionaries educated at Moor’s had connections to Oneida from past missionary work. They chose to lead converted Algonquians to Oneida territory in order to create a separatist community of Christian Indians. Though delayed by the American Revolution, the new community of Brotherton finally began in 1783 when a small number of Algonquians removed. Occom relocated his family to Brotherton in 1789. According to Hilary E. Wyss, “there were about 280 Stockbridge Indians and 250 Brotherton Indians living near Oneida” by 1791 (124). During this period Occom continued to write petitions on behalf of the Mohegan, Brotherton, Niantic, Stockbridge, Mahican, Shinnecock, and Montaukett tribes. Even as Occom and his fellow separatists were “powerfully committed to [Brotherton’s] value as a distinct community,” he continued to recognize the worth of the larger Indian community and use his literacy to work on its behalf (Wyss 152). The petitions inscribed by him demonstrate his increasing disillusionment with the promises of his white benefactors and the colonial government and his desire for an Indian world, one with interconnected nations. For Occom personally, the foundation of his vision was built substantially on his view of Christianity as a tool of survivance that would tie the Brotherton community together as one and that was cognizant of Native tradition. This vision was an outgrowth of his missionary education at Moor’s, which “fostered a strong sense of common identity” for his fellow

216

Caroline Wigginton

non-Mohegan students (Sweet 140). Occom’s and other Indian missionaries’ travels helped establish “Christian networks” that “prompted native peoples in New England to recognize a shared identity as ‘Indian’ even with pagan peoples who lived hundreds of miles away, led dramatically different styles of life, and did not even share a common language” (Sweet 141). This sense of Native community reestablished through Christianity and the belief that they had no “viable future within the United States” were the foundation of Occom’s separatist vision (Sweet 314). His sermons show an increasing disillusionment with his fellow Indians as well, a disillusionment that becomes manifest in his final petition, “Brotherton Tribe to the New York State Assembly” (1791), only one year before his death. Though he continued to work on their behalf, he clearly felt that unconverted Indians were vulnerable to the evils of white society, especially alcohol and greed. In moving to Brotherton, he hoped to separate not only from whites but also from the temptations and ruinous effects of proximity to Euroamericans, thereby in many ways purifying the community. The first petition inscribed by Occom after the establishment of Brotherton, “Mohegan and Niantic Tribes to the Connecticut Assembly” (1785), asserts Native fishing rights on the Thames River of Connecticut. The state of Connecticut had determined that the Mohegans and the Niantics would share fishing rights within the region, a negotiation that the two tribes had performed historically as a part of their lives in a coastal region and that was focused more on territory than upon quantity. However, the Connecticut Assembly granted the two tribes only one large fishing net (called a seine) worth of fish between them per year, again ignoring their long-standing rights within the region as well as their physical need for more than that small amount of fish. The small allotment demonstrates how the state government legally enforced the myth of the vanishing Indian. Together the two tribes petitioned the assembly a second time for recognition of their sovereign right to fish their territory as they chose. The petition firmly states that fishing in the region is one of their “Natural Priveledges” and that they require protection of these privileges so that “none may forbid, hinder, or restrain us from fishing in any of the places where we used to fish heretofore”: Your Excellency may well remember, that we sent a Memorial to the General Assembly, held at New Haven last October, requesting, not a Priviledge, which we never had before, but a Protection in our Natural Priviledges, which the King of Heaven gave to our Fathers and to their Children forever. When we received an answer or grant to our petition, we were all amazed and astonished beyond measure. What? Only half a sein allowed to Monooyauhegunnewuck

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

217

[Mohegan], from the best friends to the best friends? We are ready to conclude, that the meaning must be, that in time to come we must not have only one canoe, one bow, one hook and line, among two tribes, and we must have taxes imposed upon us also, &c., &c. Whilst the King of England had authority over here they order no such things upon us. Alas, where are we? If we were slaves under tyrants, we must submit; if we were captives, we must be silent, and if we were strangers, we must be contented; or if we had forfeited our priviledges at your hands by any of our agreements we should have nothing to say. Whenever we went to war against your and our enemies, one bow, and one hatchet would not do for two tribes— (148)

The petition distinguishes between the “Natural Priviledges” given by the “King of Heaven” to their “Fathers and to their Children forever” from a “Priviledge” that might be given, denied, or revoked by the Connecticut Assembly. One of Occom’s most distinct rhetorical developments is the precise use of references to familial and interpersonal relationships. This rhetoric contrasts with the humility of the 1764 petition to Johnson. Though the first petition does refer to “true Friendship,” it significantly appeals to the duties of “a tender Parent” to “‘helpless’ Children” (144). In this 1785 petition, Occom reminds the Connecticut Assembly that they are “steady, close and faithful friends” instead of establishing the Mohegans as children looking to their father (147). Between the first petition and this petition, Occom had built upon relationships established while he was a missionary in the eastern woodlands. He had participated in negotiations with the Oneidas for territory to establish Brotherton and therefore had experienced firsthand at least a portion of the Iroquois treaty process. This process includes very specifically delineated familial roles that defined “duties and obligations” that were typically “misunderstood” by Europeans ( Jennings et al. 11). Whether or not Occom himself understood the finer aspects of the Iroquois kinship system and its centrality to treaty-making is unknown. However, he certainly became aware of the potential power embedded within these terms, a power that would have been further defined for him by his knowledge of the Bible and its stories of fathers, sons, mothers, and brothers. Wyss further notes that “the language of family makes use of Algonquian social and diplomatic customs” as well (135). By saying that the privilege was given to their “Fathers” and then referring to the Connecticut Assembly as “best friends,” the petition asserts Mohegan/Niantic rights to the region and removes the whites from that genealogy, relegating them to the category of friend and establishing an equal relationship. By demoting the whites from parents to friends, the

218

Caroline Wigginton

language also dispenses with the “series of interlocking obligations” traditionally embedded in Algonquian kinship (Wyss 135). The petition prepares the audience for this distinction in the opening when Occom writes, “Your steady, close and faithful friends the tribe of Mohegan, and the tribe of Nahantick sendeth greeting. Sincere friends and brethren may talk freely together without offence. Such we concluded, the English of Connecticut and Mohegans, and Nahanticks are” (147–148). These lines clarify the difference in the relationship between Native nations and between Natives and whites, placing a tighter bond between Indigenous communities. The language further removes the English from the intertribal connection by having the two tribes “sendeth” greeting to the Connecticut Assembly, the formal-sounding suffix distancing and defamiliarizing them. The fact that fishing privileges were conferred upon their fathers further strengthens their intertribal ties and distances the white government by establishing a history and tradition of familial bonds from which the whites are excluded. The petition is an important statement of pantribal unity and kinship. However, Occom is also careful to maintain the two tribes as separate nations. Though the syntax is somewhat confusing, he feigns disbelief that the Connecticut Assembly would presume that “only one canoe, one bow, one hook and line” would be sufficient for “two tribes” (148). The tribes appeal together within the bounds of kinship, but they remain separate communities with separate needs and economic systems. The transition back to the repeated use of “we” again unifies the tribes. Occom then separates them again when he notes that “one bow, and one hatchet would not do for two tribes” during wartime when they allied with the colonists, both against fellow tribes and against the British crown. While the two tribes partner in petitioning, their vision of survivance includes remaining distinct nations, both from each other and from the new American government. While they may not be able to enact their vision upon their ancestral soil, they can write petitions that enact these careful divisions within the written language and within the archives of the white government. Pan-Indian sovereignty also appears in the structured communication of an ongoing sense of grievance. In a crescendo of negative comparisons of tribal members first to “slaves under tyrants,” then to “captives,” and finally to “strangers,” the petition linguistically distances the two tribes from the whites under a shared sense of angry grievance (148). This language also mirrors the colonists’ own rhetoric in their rebellion against England. After bringing the idea of revolution to mind, Occom underscores tribal anger through his reference to war and hatchets, which contains a veiled threat even as it reminds the Connecticut Assembly of past alliances between the different groups. This sequence climaxes when Occom asks, “And what will the various tribes of Indians, of this boundless continent say, when they hear of this

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

219

restraint of fishing upon us? Will they not all cry out, mmauk, mmauk, these are the good that the Mohegans ever gloried and boasted of ” (148).14 In examining other Occom works, Dana D. Nelson argues that, although “Occom refuses to hide his language [. . . ,] he cannot escape knowing that his Indian language, like his Indian appearance, confirms his inferiority within the logic of the dominant community” (57–58). However, the pointed use of the Mohegan word “mmauk” in this petition shows that the retention and display of the Mohegan language fits within the overall process of survivance. It remains as a reminder of the strangeness of Indians, their untranslatability to Euroamerican culture even as they have trappings of white society including Christianity, literacy, and legal knowledge. Occom stabs the reminder into the audience by repeating “mmauk.” The alienness that the word performs for whites asserts the Mohegans’ lack of desire to assimilate to whiteness and the pride the Mohegans have in their unique tribal identity and language. The continuing presence of the Mohegan language itself further refutes the vanishing Indian myth, as does the physical requirement expressed by the petition for more than “one canoe, one bow, one hook and line, among two tribes” (148). Occom and his copetitioners, both Mohegan and Niantic, shout their presence to the whites, to other tribes, and to their own tribal members. By doing so, they assert survivance as well, since survivance focuses on presence instead of absence. Rhetorical sovereignty appears in the continuing use of irony and sarcasm, the subversive and illusive element somewhat tentatively placed within the 1764 petition to Johnson. After sharing grievances and anger, Occom concludes the petition with a return to a calm tone: “We conclude your excellencies must have mistaken our request. And therefore we earnestly pray again, that the honorable Assembly would protect us in our Natural Priveledges, that none may forbid, hinder, or restrain us from fishing in any of the places where we used to fish heretofore” (148). The “excellencies” suggests sarcasm, and the “honorable” ironically reminds the whites of past dishonor toward their Indian allies. Here sarcasm and irony perform a sovereign identity since the language dares. It dares the white audience to punish the tribes for their audacity, and it dares them to acknowledge their dishonor and criminality. It dares to refute the idea of the poor, humble Indian, and it dares to insult. The message of interconnected, pan-Indian sovereignty and survivance continues in a series of three petitions written by Occom on behalf of three different tribal communities. Tentatively dated 1785, the petitions are “Brotherton Tribe to United States Congress,” “Montaukett Tribe to the State of New York,” and “Shinnecock Tribe to the State of New York.” The three petitions each follow a similar structure. In them Occom first flatteringly addresses the petitions’ audiences. Next he provides a general history of each region’s natural resources and each tribe’s relationship to those resources. In these sections he

220

Caroline Wigginton

includes the process by which the resources were lost and describes the current state of encroachment. He places blame both on past Native leaders who were ignorant of English property rights and land value and on the colonists who shamefully took advantage of them. Finally, he includes a specific request. Occom also includes a reference to the American Revolution and its success in each petition, but the location of that reference varies: the Brotherton petition places the reference in the midst of the history, and the other two petitions place the reference before beginning the history. Knowing that Occom worked with multiple tribes writing multiple peÂ� titions during this period provides a glimpse into the pan-Indian communitism that Occom performed. Through these petitions, Occom uses his literacy and knowledge of whites to serve various tribes, not only helping these tribes as a scribe, but also reaffirming and extending networks present before contact. Though Mohegan policy and survival tactics established under the first sachem, Uncas, focused on cooperation with whites, Occom demonstrates that cooperation with whites does not necessarily exclude cooperation with other tribes as well. In fact, as numbers decreased and as the tribe became increasingly impoverished due to encroachment and other effects of colonization, maintaining the strength of other tribes would help establish a common pot of strength, as discussed by Lisa Brooks throughout her chapter “The Mohegan Narrative of Native Rights” (58–128). Yet Occom predicated his own communitist vision upon the establishment of Brotherton, a new tribe for Christian Indians and a place for him to continue his ministry. Through the petitions’ language, he linguistically translates his old world upon the coast to his new future in Oneida territory. For him, survivance is built upon Native Christianity, the language of which permeates these petitions. In Brotherton he and his fellow founders imagine “the community as a single living, functioning being” that “produces the community’s collective history as its autobiography or more properly its autoethnography” (Wyss 126). Though he wrote these petitions on behalf of different tribes, the Brotherton vision plays out in the petitions, especially through the creation stories and histories he repeats in each version. In order for Brotherton to work, the disparate tribes needed to come together as one under a Christian story. By molding Native history for all tribes and incorporating both traditional cosmology and Christianity, Occom merges the tribes together under one autoethnography and enables the establishment of a cohesive community. In the tribal histories, Occom repeatedly refers to the creation of the world by the “Great” or “Supreme” “Spirit above” (149, 151, 152), a title that refers ambiguously to both the Indian Creator and the Christian God.15 The histories that follow these references are rife with Edenic images in which the

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

221

precontact world is innocent and abundant, as in this version from the petition on behalf of the Montaukett tribe: The Great and good Spirit above, Saw fit in his good pleasure, to plant our Fore-Fathers in this great Wilderness but when and how, none knows but himself,—and he that works all things Acording to his own Mind, Saw it good to give us this great Continent & he fill’d this Indian World, with veriety, and a Prodigous Number of four footed Beasts, Fowl without number and Fish of all kinds great and Small, fill’d our Seas, Rivers, Brooks, and Ponds every where,—and it was the Pleasure of him, Who orders all things acording to his good Will, he that maketh Rich, and maketh poor, he that kills, and that maketh alive, he that raiseth up whom he will, and pulleth down ^whom^ he will; Saw fit, to keep us in Porverty, Only to live upon the Provisions he hath made already at our Hands—Thus we livd, till it pleased the great and good Governor of the World, to Send your Fathers into these goings down of the Sun, and found us Naked and very poor Destitute of every thing, that your Fathers injoyd, only this that we had good and a Large Country to live in, and well furnished with Natural Provisions, and there was not a Letter known amongst them all in this Boundless Continent. (151)

By comparing the Indian world to Eden, Occom works within a Christian cosmology in which the Native inhabitants are religiously chosen to occupy the land. The biblical feel of the passage builds upon the language of abundance and the use of antiquated verb forms such as “maketh” and “pulleth” that echo the 1603 King James Bible. The whites’ arrival brings the loss of innocence and ejection from the garden, just as the serpent’s arrival does in the biblical creation story. In Occom’s version, aligning past leaders such as Uncas with Eve and the whites with Satan, the Indians “are undone” “by our Fore Fathers Ignorance and Your Fathers great Knowledge” (151). This version of creation and lost Eden echoes a similar story told to his fellow Indians in a 1784 sermon. Like these petitions, the sermon refers to the “Great ^good^ Supream and Indepentant Spirit above” as the Creator and provides a Native Christianity that incorporates elements of Native traditions (196). Though Occom does not align the whites explicitly with the serpent during the sermon, he describes the loss of Eden as becoming like the devil himself: Now their Eyes were opened only to See their Misery, to know good and Evil to their Sorrow, and they now see and know, that

222

Caroline Wigginton

they have lost all, they have lost the Blessed Image and Likeness of God, they have lost their Beauty, Excellence, Holiness, and glory, they have lost the Sweet Fellowship, Communion and Enjoyment of God, and Contracted the Image of the Devil and all his Likeness,—^and in Stead of being Gods they are Devils^—and have lost all this World, and the fullness thereof, they have lost the garden that god made for them Yea they are broke and become Bankrupts, and are fugitives and Vagabonds in the Earth, and are now liable to all maner of Miseries in this Life, liable to every Disease, Sicknesses, and Accidents, and is now Danger and Fear on every Side, and is liable to Death Continually, and as God told him that in the Day thou eatest thereof thou Shall Surely Die, and he is now Spiritually Dead, Dead in Trespasses and in Sins thus they have ruined themselves and all their Posterity with them[.] (197)

While Christianity was brought to “this World” by whites, Occom and his fellow converts view Christianity as an intracommunity through which they can regenerate their ties and claim a new country, separate from whites and their corrupting influence. Occom desires to return to the “Blessed Image and Likeness of God,” not spread “the Image of the Devil and all his Likeness” (197). Resistance-oriented interpretations may judge Occom harshly for his missionary work and his conversion of his fellow Indians away from their Native religious culture, but in his view that culture had become corrupted, and the only way to survive and flourish was to build those remnants into a new future. By using this Christian version of Indian history in the petitions, Occom simulates a different Genesis story. Writing down the story enacts that version, the simulation made manifest. The petitions build upon Occom’s experience as a Christian minister whose job included writing and speaking sermons. In sermons, preachers manipulate language and symbols to create meaning and reveal truths as well as to stir the listeners of both the faithful and reluctant variety. The incorporation of Christian imagery also helps counteract evergrowing myths about the vanishing Indian. Indians had a reputation as great orators during this period, as indicated by the roughly contemporaneous popularity of Thomas Jefferson’s memorialization of “Logan’s Lament” in Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1784. Jefferson’s and other early Americans’ attraction to the “Lament” demonstrates their desire to have a romantic, but dying image of the Indian that would enable Americans to claim the romantic heritage for their own and to legitimate both their presence in America and their separateness from England. As Wind notes, “Celebrating eloquence as the supreme achievement of primitive American peoples became an expression of confidence in the destiny of the new nation” (41),

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

223

and it worked hand-in-hand with “the need to perceive the Indian as a soonto-be extinct species” (45). Murray explains the “appetite” for printed Indian speeches “whose content offered an often devastating criticism of white actions” by noting that the “nobility and eloquence” of the complaints confirmed the “inevitability of their disappearance” (36; emphasis original). Occom plays with the desire to hear a great Indian speech when he introduces all three histories with the request to the whites to “hear us” (149, 151, 152). Yet the words he uses are frequently biblical and therefore imply that the Indians are not vanishing and that they are educated in colonial culture. By claiming at least some connection to Christianity, the petitions also claim continuing presence and argue for the respect of God’s other Christian worshippers. At the same time, Occom rejects the equation of Christianity with EuroÂ� american cultivation, an equation used to justify colonial encroachment upon Indian land. In undermining this justification, his history indicates that extensive precontact cultivation was unnecessary since the land provided “Spontaneous Produc^t^” (149). The petitions present the postcontact increase in agricultural cultivation and some Native men’s new agricultural responsibilities as a result of the loss of God’s favor, not a positive indication of conversion to Christian civilization. The petitions conclude with specific requests for items such as “a grist mill and a Saw Mill” (150), “all manner of Husbandry Tools” (150), “150 head of Cattle” (152), “Horses” (152), and “Hogs” (153). The mundane necessity of these requests further shatters the vanishing Indian image. The requests assert continuing presence and a community with commonplace needs. Though these moments may not contain the rhetorical and oratory aesthetics of the histories, they demonstrate the tactical nature of the remainder of the petitions. The petitions both philosophically and legally affirm Native sovereignty as well as acknowledge the very material requirements for survival. Perhaps the most moving moment occurs at the end of “Brotherton Tribe to United States Congress.” The final request is for “a little Liberary, for we would have our Children have some Learning,—our Young People are much inclined to learn” (150). Along with requests for tools and mills for the production of food and housing, this final appeal shows that literacy is as important for ongoing tribal existence and recognizes the place of literacy and education in the transformed Indian world. I do not wish to imply that the incorporation of Native Christianity and the philosophy of Christian separatism within these post-Brotherton documents was the best strategy for resistance. Undoubtedly, Occom’s vision destroyed pieces of culture and community even as it built others. After all, as Wyss points out in her analysis of Brotherton, “the Native founders of Brotherton rejected the authority of White missionaries to speak for them, and in the process they reconceptualized the meaning of Native community

224

Caroline Wigginton

along deeply masculinist lines” (126), a strategy that resulted in the “disempowerment of Native women” (139). This marginalization of women’s traditional authority is just one of the ways in which Native culture changed under Occom’s and other Indian missionaries’ spread of Christianity. For exactly this reason, survivance is the key to interpreting Occom’s petitions. Occom and the communities he wrote on behalf of were seeking ways to survive, not nobly vanish. While other choices existed and the majority of Mohegans who remained behind in Connecticut made some of them, these are the ones chosen by the petitions’ communities and the ways in which Occom helped craft, influence, and perform them. Instead of condemning Occom, we can understand his choices and how he enacted them. We can also acknowledge the fact that many other choices will remain unstudied and even unknown since it is Occom’s literacy and Christianity that provided an archive for modern scholars. In this light, I return to 1994 and the Mohegan case for tribal recognition. As noted earlier, Occom was an important link in establishing “continuous authority” in this case (Fawcett-Sayet 52). Fawcett-Sayet places Occom within the chain of Mohegans who maintained “sociocultural lifeways” and uses his leadership during a “difficult transitional era” to demonstrate the “usher[ing] in [of ] an era in which the sociocultural leader would reign supreme” (52). Occom’s importance resides in his connection of formal political leadership to cultural leadership, for him specifically in terms of acting as scribe and in his sachemlike Christian ministry. Occom’s life work, which includes these documents, was a crucial component in obtaining federal recognition of the Mohegan tribe along with seven hundred acres of reclaimed Mohegan land. The documents of eighteenth-century survivance not only demonstrate the dynamic process by which Indians determine and assert communal identity but also exemplify the ways in which those moments resonate into the future.

No t e s 1. See the Mohegan tribal Web site for a listing of the 1994 criteria: http:// www.mohegan.nsn.us/government/criteria.aspx. For a longer discussion of the tribal recognition process and sociocultural authority, see Fawcett-Sayet. For a history of sociocultural leaders and their specific contributions, see Fawcett. 2. The Mohegan language is currently undergoing recovery. See the Mohegan tribal Web site for details: http://www.mohegan.nsn.us/heritage/preservations. aspx?p=language. 3. In using language to make things happen, the petitions build upon English linguistic power as well. J. L. Austin writes of performative utterances, describing them as utterances “in which to say something is to do something” (12; emphasis original). Austin distinguishes these utterances from those describing something that has happened, that is happening, or that will happen. He provides examples

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

225

such as saying “I do” at a wedding or saying “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow” (5). The act occurs within and through the utterance itself. ╇ 4. Maureen Konkle views Native writers as being “keenly aware of the problems they faced, of the power of EuroAmerican representation [in writing] and the necessity of establishing authority for their own knowledge” by the early nineteenth century (39). By examining a nontraditional literary genre such as legal petitions, we can see that Native authors in the 1700s were already working to establish that epistemological authority as well as control their land and sovereignty through writing. ╇ 5. Occom’s complete works were published only recently in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America. ╇ 6. Occom received his missionary education at Moor’s Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, under the tutelage of Eleazar Wheelock. After completing his training, Occom preached to various coastal Indian communities such as the Montaukett Tribe of Long Island. His missionary work lasted for several decades and included time spent among the Iroquois and a fundraising trip to Europe on behalf of Wheelock and his school. For more biographical information on Occom, see Peyer and Lisa Brooks. ╇ 7. In his chapter “Identity in Mashpee,” Clifford points out the real consequences of seeing Christian conversion as being incapable of coexisting with Native “cultural wholeness” (337). The Mashpees were unable to prove in court that they constituted a continuous Indian tribe. The jurors even ruled that they were not a tribe at the time of the trial (335). ╇ 8. Ben III was the son of Ben II and the grandson of Major Ben Uncas. Against Mohegan tradition, colonists had helped Major Ben Uncas to the sachemship in 1723. For more extensive histories of the Mohegan tribe, see Peyer and Lisa Brooks. Occom grew up in Ben’s Town among supporters of Major Ben Uncas and his heirs. The other faction resided mainly in John’s Town, originally supporting Mahomet as the rightful sachem instead of Major Ben Uncas. ╇ 9. Fawcett-Sayet notes that this lack of continuous formal individual leadership initially undermined the Mohegan tribal recognition case in the 1980s, placing the Mohegans in a historical catch-22 (52). 10. In her edition of Occom’s writings, Joanna Brooks retains Occom’s editorial notations, and they appear in this essay as well, usually in the form of insertion symbols (^) or strikethroughs. 11. Lisa Brooks further identifies Occom’s use of root and branch imagery as an echo of his “forebear Appagese,” who used the same imagery in another document (111). 12. According to Lisa Brooks, the introductory flattery toward Johnson also suggests that Occom’s travels to the Iroquois taught him “literacy in the language of Iroquois diplomacy” (110). The language of humility is therefore a declaration of panIndian community and identity in addition to being an expression and manipulation of petition rhetoric. More work needs to be done in tracing the influence of Iroquois diplomacy upon Occom’s writings and leadership. The root and branch image and the flattery are just two examples within this single document. 13. Examples of biblical stories and images used by Occom as main themes for his sermons include creation and the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1:1–3:24, the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37, Matthew 22:42, Ezekiel 33:11,

226

Caroline Wigginton

1 Timothy 6:12, and 2 Corinthians 5:17. Within many of his sermons, Occom performs careful close readings of the biblical passages in order to both exhort his audience to a Christian life and to condemn Christians in name only (see Occom 166–229). His interpretations often envision a specifically Native Christianity. 14. According to a note, the meaning of “mmauk” in English may be “fish” or “our fish” (148n7). 15. Fawcett cites a 1930 Lenni Lenape creation story told to Medicine Woman Gladys Tantaguidgeon as the “first Mohegan story” (7). In the story, the Creator is named “Great Manitou” or Gunche Mundu (7).

Wor k s Ci t e d Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Brooks, Joanna. American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Brooks, Lisa. “The Common Pot: Indigenous Writing and the Reconstruction of Native Space in the Northeast.” Diss. Cornell University, 2004. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Fawcett, Melissa Jayne. The Lasting of the Mohegans, Part I: The Story of the Wolf People. Uncasville, CT: The Mohegan Tribe, 1995. Fawcett-Sayet, Melissa. “Sociocultural Authority: The Mohegan Land Case.” Rooted Like the Ash Trees: New England Indians and the Land. Rev. ed. Ed. Richard G. Carlson. Naugatuck, CT: Eagle Wing Press, 1987. 52–53. Holy Bible: King James Version. New York: American Bible Society, 1980. Jennings, Francis, et al., eds. The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985. Konkle, Maureen. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. The Mohegan Tribe. March 28, 2008. The Mohegan Tribe. April 8, 2008. http://www. mohegan.nsn. Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts. London: Pinter, 1991. Nelson, Dana D. “‘(I Speak Like a Fool, but I am Constrained)’: Samson Occom’s Short Narrative and Economies of the Racial Self.” Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Helen Jaskoski and A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 42–65. Occom, Samson. The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America. Ed. Joanna Brooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Peyer, Bernd. The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Sweet, John Wood. Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Vizenor, Gerald. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration

227

——— . Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994. Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. London: Oxford University Press, 1997. Wind, Astrid. “‘Adieu to all’: The Death of the American Indian at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century.” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 2.1 (1998): 39–55. Wyss, Hilary E. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

Ack now l e d gme n t Thank you to Joanna Brooks for providing me with a manuscript copy of The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan. Thank you to James Cox and Lisa Moore for all their invaluable feedback on early drafts.

J oseph L . C oulombe

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding in James Welch’s Historical Fiction

I

n Fools Crow and The Heartsong of Charging Elk, James Welch examines the social and cultural links between Natives and non-Natives, demonstrating how different peoples and cultures intersect in both positive and negative ways. While current scholarship tends to privilege autonomous tribal knowledge systems, this essay explores an equally important trend that Welch helped to inaugurate.1 In his historical fiction, Welch emphasizes connections between cultures—lessening differences between cultural groups and fostering mutual respect in the process—without losing sight of the historical outrages committed upon Native peoples. His earlier novel, Fools Crow (1986), recreates the period of first contact between Blackfeet tribes and Euro-Americans to illuminate the alliances and conflicts, the treaties and wars, and the cultural exchanges and political inequities that nearly destroyed a way of life over 130 years ago. The latter novel, The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000), begins where Fools Crow left off, focusing on the shift to reservation life among the Oglala Sioux after white America stole their lands. In both novels Welch compels readers to reevaluate common versions of U.S. history. He initially places most readers in the role of outsider, but he ultimately invites them into distinct tribal cultures to deepen their understanding and expand their awareness of similarities between ostensibly different peoples. Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 20, Number 3 (Fall 2008): pp. 1–28. Copyright © 2008 Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures.

229

230

Joseph L. Coulombe

Although Welch’s fiction appeals to all types of readers—Native, nonNative, academic, and general—this essay considers the ways in which Welch targets a popular audience interested in but not fluent in Native studies or specific tribal cultures. In a 1995 interview Welch said: I feel the need to present Indians in a way that would be educational to readers, and I hope it would be entertaining, and really to bring some sort of understanding to the outside community of what life is like for Indians on reservations and Indians in historical times. (Bellinelli)

A sizable portion of his intended audience seems to be readers in the “outside community,” and he addresses this audience in a manner that highlights the links between people of different cultural backgrounds. His presentation of Native words and near-translations, his descriptions of cultural practices, his recounting of tribal stories, his use of humor, and his emphasis upon the importance of community all offer insight into the shared qualities of a common humanity. By demonstrating similarities as well as showcasing differences, Welch’s historical novels serve to empower and liberate Native people and communities, a stated goal of indigenous scholar-activists Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, among others.2 Fools Crow and Heartsong treat racial issues and relationships in a manner that defines the present as much as the past, effectively dismantling many misconceptions and stereotypes that support discrimination today. Although clearly intent upon correcting the historical record, Welch also offers hope for the future, and he targets a general readership to influence popular attitudes. He uses fiction to break down barriers, showing readers that intersections of belief and practice between people makes assaults on one group essentially an attack on the self. James Clifford argues, “‘Cultural’ difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness; self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essence” (14). Harnessing the power of literature, Welch challenges rigid racial and cultural categories—while still honoring differences—and he reveals shared motivations, doubts, and ideas in order to break down constructed divisions in our past, present, and future. His focus on connections between people does not prevent Fools Crow and Heartsong from acting also as resistance literature.3 Both novels explicitly subvert prevailing stereotypes about Natives. While writing Fools Crow, Welch himself said: “I’m trying to write from the inside-out, because most historical novels are written from the outside looking in. [. . . From the perspective of Fools Crow] the white people are the real strangers. They’re the threatening presence out there all the time” (McFarland 4–5). Welch’s Native-centered

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

231

approach in Fools Crow decenters many readers, compelling them to rethink conventional attitudes regarding the expansion of the United States and the social and military policies that allowed it.4 In other words, Welch’s historical fiction initially “others” non-Native readers by placing white Americans at the margins of the main story. In Fools Crow Welch uses the historical narrative to situate readers in a cultural framework specific to the Blackfeet. The events at the novel’s core are historically documented occurrences that Welch outlines in Killing Custer (1994). Owl Child, a Blackfeet warrior shunned by his own community for a murder, killed the white trader Malcolm Clark in August 1869. Although the act was revenge for a personal insult, it became an excuse for U.S. troops to attack all Natives, a course of action that culminated in the Marias River Massacre (sometimes called the Baker Massacre). Welch himself has a very personal connection to this history. He has identified Malcolm Clark and possibly Heavy Runner as relations, and he ascribes much of the inspiration for Fools Crow to his great-grandmother, Red Paint Woman, who was part of Heavy Runner’s band on the Marias River, and whose stories he heard from his father. Among other things, Fools Crow informs readers that 173 men, women, and children were killed despite a signed agreement between Chief Heavy Runner and General Alfred Sully. Welch focuses on this catastrophe to publicize a fundamental event within Blackfeet and U.S. history as well as to provide a context more generally to rethink popularized historical episodes such as “Custer’s last stand.” To Welch, both massacres are central to Blackfeet history and to U.S. history. To separate them is to distort. Whereas Custer’s death has been mythologized as part of a larger story about American providence, the massacre on the Marias River has been largely ignored. Welch hopes to change that in Fools Crow by reconstructing events from a Native perspective, compelling readers to understand them outside of the promotional narrative about “winning the West” and “manifest destiny.” In this version, Malcolm Clark is not a victim, but a hapless hypocrite; Joe Kipp is not an intrepid scout, but a self-serving turncoat; General Alfred Sully is not a noble ambassador of white America, but a small-minded negotiator of meaningless contracts. Fools Crow resists a whitewashed view of U.S. history and instead recreates a particular cultural moment that demonstrates how different peoples and cultures both clashed and merged. The Heartsong of Charging Elk also seeks to alter the way that many readers think about Native history and its relation to European/American society, but it performs this task in a slightly different manner. Welch identifies Black Elk as his historical precedent, a man who had traveled with Buffalo Bill’s show, missed the return ship home to America, and lived in Europe for two years (56–58). Charging Elk is also left in France by Buffalo Bill’s

232

Joseph L. Coulombe

“Wild West Show,” and he survives in a new world that is both fascinated and frightened by him. In turn he is simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by French culture. Inverting the imperialist pattern, Charging Elk and the other young Natives travel to Europe in search of adventure, fun, and wealth. They are the explorers who enter and occasionally disrupt the others’ world, taking pride in their difference and pleasure in shocking the Europeans: “the young Indians enjoyed the spectacle of themselves reflected in the astonished eyes of the French people” (27). Not going quite so far as claiming to have discovered France, they nonetheless traverse its streets with confidence and bravado. On the other hand, they face much bias, and Charging Elk’s experiences (in some respects) parallel the hurdles faced by Native people generally during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, Charging Elk is declared officially “dead” by inept government operatives, whereas in the United States Natives were often treated as a “vanishing” people by many white officials. Both Charging Elk and twentieth-century Natives were compelled to survive in a hostile cultural environment that refused to recognize them in any meaningful way and then ignored them as inconsequential. Charging Elk’s dream of Native Ghost Dancers suggests his hope for recognition and independence (114), yet his recurring dream of mass death probably refers to the massacre at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1890. Many historians consider Wounded Knee as the end of organized armed resistance to white attack and the beginning of a bleak period of forced assimilation. Charging Elk loses many of his Native ways while stranded in France and attempts to blend into life in Marseille. However, when Charging Elk is fetishized by a French man, who drugs and molests him, Charging Elk kills the man. The experience is emblematic of how Native cultures were exoticized by outsiders (despite fierce resistance), while the subsequent trial exposes the overt prejudice at the heart of such simplifications. During the proceedings, “specialists” disclaim on the size of “savages’ brains” and “mental capacity,” all part of a process that relegates Charging Elk to a “living death” (291). Welch’s narrative recalls the manner in which Natives were judged and condemned according to the prevailing culture’s prejudices. In the end, though, Charging Elk gains a renewed sense of self that combines his connection to the past with a strong understanding of his place in the present. He finally gets a real choice, and his decision to stay in France with his wife and expectant child points not only to the impossibility of ever returning fully to his previous life but also to his successful adaptation and contribution to a changed world. Welch’s historical fiction does more than present Native history from a Native perspective, however. Both Fools Crow and Heartsong involve readers within a narrative that compels them to resituate themselves.5 Particularly for readers not fluent in Blackfeet and Lakota cultures, a period of readjustment

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

233

must take place. Welch’s use of language forces readers into the role of outsider.6 Immediately in the initial paragraphs of Fools Crow, readers are confronted with an unfamiliar world in which “Cold Maker” and the “Backbone of the World” hold dominance. Welch describes people, places, and things using near-translations and Native words that distance many readers from their familiar world. In Fools Crow frogs are “green singers,” grizzly bears are “real-bears,” and fish are “the swift silver people who live in the water” (56). White people are “Napikwans,” and the federal troops—appropriately enough—are “seizers.” Thus, Welch defamiliarizes conventional perspectives for many readers, in effect taking control of the language to redefine popular perceptions of American history.7 Nevertheless Welch’s choice risks exoticizing a culture that is too often treated as a curiosity; his language could be perceived as contrived or wooden. Critics have discussed the efficacy of writing subversively in English, or “reinventing the enemy’s language” (Harjo and Bird). Robert Gish notes briefly that Welch risks “silliness,” but that ultimately his “scheme of naming [. . .] has the intended effect of establishing an older (but for the reader newer) way of knowing” (71). Welch asks readers to do more than suspend their disbelief; he asks them to transform their beliefs by re-visioning the world using new terms and a new context. Blanca Schorcht praises Welch’s use of hyphenated coinages: “This kind of translation simultaneously prevents the exoticization of Native American history while it emphasizes differences in experience” (96). However, while his use of language may initially highlight differences, it ultimately allows similarities to come to the forefront. To this end Welch’s terminology recalls Ernest Hemingway’s language in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In this novel set in Spain, Hemingway “translates” Spanish language and culture into English in a manner that retains the flavor of the original. Hemingway’s protagonist, Robert Jordan, who hails from Missoula, Montana (which was, incidentally, also home to Welch), uses diction that reflects both the formality of Spanish (“thou hast,” “thee”) and the literalness, even the stiffness, of translation (“not even in joke” [30], “we are various” [151]). Welch, an avowed admirer of Hemingway, uses language in a similar manner. Both writers initially compel readers to navigate an unfamiliar world but ultimately provide enough information for readers to achieve a greater level of understanding. Welch, in particular, invites readers into a unique but often misunderstood culture, allowing them first to become comfortable with differences between languages and cultures—and then to recognize the similarities between people. Likewise, The Heartsong of Charging Elk asks readers to understand western European society via a Native perspective and language. This time, however, Welch defamiliarizes the “white” world, rather than, as in Fools Crow, rendering a Native cultural and physical environment in new terms.

234

Joseph L. Coulombe

Early in the narrative Charging Elk wakes up in a “white man’s healing house” after an injury and illness, and he must explain to himself—and to readers—where he is and what he sees. His descriptions interpret French society from the perspective of an Oglala Sioux, while also commenting humorously on non-Native customs (not to mention Charging Elk’s own personal attitudes). Dollar bills are “frogskins”; coffee is “pejuta sapa, black medicine” (17); and alcohol is “mni wakan, the white man’s holy water” (21). Whites themselves are “wasicuns.” Welch also details Charging Elk’s response to a Christmas nativity scene and the “naked iron tree” (i.e., Eiffel Tower) (42). Interestingly, he describes national anthems as “power songs” (66), a phrase that redefines a typically conservative point of pride into a Native intellectual framework. This reference takes a nationalistic icon (i.e., the anthem)—something that distinguishes one group of people from others—and transforms it into something that crosses cultural borders. In Welch’s treatment, it serves as a connection between people, not a separator. In this way, Welch does more than disorient readers within his historical fiction; he also reorients them. While his terminology might initially decenter readers, it ultimately invites readers into a rich and vibrant Native world. Welch uses Fools Crow especially to teach readers a new way of seeing and understanding. A good example of how this works occurs during a conversation between Fools Crow and Red Paint on the night before Fools Crow leaves to revenge Yellow Kidney’s mutilation. As he and Red Paint lie in their lodge, they hear “the barking and howling of Kis-see-noh-o” (135). While the description of the sounds may signal the specific animal to some readers, others might not immediately make sense of the reference, and, in fact, several different animals bark and howl. In the next line Welch aids readers by identifying Kis-see-noh-o as the “little-wolves,” thus using a calque to rule out wolves proper and to give a strong hint as to the animals he is referencing. Not until two pages later, however, does Welch identify with certainty the animals as coyotes (137). This relatively minor detail demonstrates how Welch instructs and includes readers. He first destabilizes or decenters them with a non-English word or a near-translation; then he provides textual clues that allow readers to figure out his reference; and finally he gives them (sometimes) the opportunity to double-check their conclusions. As a result, Welch allows readers to overcome their lack of knowledge and the resulting discomfort. At first they are outsiders, and his language excludes them from full participation within the narrative. However, he does not sustain this exclusion. They gain a small piece of knowledge that involves them more fully in the novel and perhaps promotes their understanding—and hopefully their respect for—the Native American experience.

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

235

Readers are asked to perform a daunting task in Fools Crow—learn about a complex culture probably unfamiliar to many of them—and so Welch makes efforts to alleviate anxieties that readers might have about being placed in the role of student. Even prominent characters must learn the ways of their own culture. For example, when Mik-api teases Fools Crow about his crush on Red Paint, Fools Crow asks him to speak on his behalf, and Mikapi responds: “Slow down, you foolish young one. [. . .] First, you must go to your father and mother and tell them of your intentions. If they agree, I will talk to Yellow Kidney” (105). Like readers, Fools Crow must be taught the courtship rituals of the Pikunis. As Fools Crow grows and learns, Welch undoubtedly hopes that readers will also mature in their knowledge. Fools Crow contains strong elements of the bildungsroman, a component of the novel that undoubtedly rings familiar to many readers. Yet Fools Crow also attempts to cultivate public opinion about unfamiliar or underappreciated components of Native cultures. To create a comfort zone suitable for learning, Welch shows how all people must learn their own culture. By doing this, he not only encourages readers to understand and respect Blackfeet culture, but he also motivates them to learn (or relearn) their own culture and history.8 An important way that Welch teaches readers is with Blackfeet stories, a traditional Native manner of imparting information and wisdom to successive generations. He provides fairly detailed accounts of Seco-mo-muckon, of Akaiyan and Nopatsis, and of So-at-sa-ki (Feather Woman) and Poia (Scar Face). At one level these Blackfeet stories provide commentary upon the novel’s events. Seco-mo-muckon’s pride and deceit echo that of Fast Horse, as does Akaiyan’s treacherous betrayal of his brother. Nopatsis’s patience, learning, and success parallel the experiences of Fools Crow. On another level, however, these stories draw readers more deeply into Pikuni culture, inviting them to understand and appreciate the worth of the culture that created these stories. Readers receive information that should lessen the difference between cultures, rather than make one seem more exotic or foreign than the other. Some critics even locate a “merging of two cultures” in Welch’s depiction of Blackfeet stories. Velie states that Welch’s bildungsroman draws upon both the Native tradition of Scar Face and the Euro-American tradition of Horatio Alger (199–200). Whether Welch consciously thought of Alger as he wrote is perhaps less important than that Velie makes this connection. The stories allow bridges between cultures by sharing messages that transcend a specific culture. These stories undoubtedly have specific cultural meanings for the Blackfeet, but when shared with a national and international audience, they will also be understood (as Welch was well aware) in terms already familiar to readers. Because of this, Welch again risks himself here. Some might argue that publishing Native stories allows them to be distorted by removing them from

236

Joseph L. Coulombe

their most important cultural context and placing them within potentially oppressive belief systems.9 However, Native writer and teacher Sidner Larson argues that making connections across cultures is a specifically Native methodology. He asks his students to read Native texts “with strong emphasis on students relating their own lives to the materials” (14). Likewise, Blanca Schorcht notes how traditional Native stories should be incorporated into readers’ ways of thinking: “Their different worlds engage in dialogues with each other as they converge with the real world of the contemporary reader” (88). Welch values just such connections. In Killing Custer he recalls a moment of revelation in his dream to become a writer. In his adolescence he believed that real writers had to live in New York City and, presumably, write about it too. As he tells it, his mother showed him some documents that demonstrated how Sitting Bull lived in and journeyed through northern Montana. He writes: “Suddenly, the area did not seem so remote. Suddenly, my part of the country had history, a connection with the rest of the country—at least the west” (232, emphasis added). Welch appreciates this connection because it links Native American history to Euro-American history. He did not see the overlapping histories in conflict with each other; rather, it seems, they inform each other and, moreover, encouraged Welch to write about the Blackfeet experience as part of U.S. history. Whereas Fast Horse in Fools Crow foolishly resists any meaningful dialogue about his past (200), Welch uses his historical fiction to open up a dialogue with readers that promises further understanding rather than more violence. One of Welch’s primary goals is to invite readers into a Native culture and so dispel misconceptions about it. His most successful strategy is his direct description of Native traditions within their cultural framework. The Sun Dance ceremony, for example, is an annual unifying celebration during which individuals make sacrifices for themselves and their people. Readers learn of the important role of the Sacred Vow Woman, about the process by which the center pole of the Medicine Lodge is chosen and prepared, and about how young men enter adulthood by dancing around the pole. Welch’s rendering of the ceremony demonstrates its purpose and, as a result, its normalcy, thus demystifying an important tradition that was criminalized by the U.S. government and is still sometimes treated as an exotic curiosity by non-Natives.10 Welch’s willingness to share details of the Sun Dance with readers is a gauge of his desire to combat the distorted images that revolve around the celebration. In addition, his personal involvement in the ceremony as a child helped Welch become fully aware of his Blackfeet identity. In a foreword to William Farr’s photographic history, The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945, Welch recalls attending the ceremony with his father and watching the procession of holy people: “A voice, high and distant, sang to the sun and it entered my

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

237

bones and I was Blackfeet and changed forever. I remember. Thirty-four years later the image of that Sun Dance procession is still with me, and in my novels and poems I have tried to maintain the spirit of that momentâ•›” (vii, emphasis added). Fools Crow captures the spirit of that moment by inviting readers into a literary rendering of the experience. By sharing such an essentially Native ritual with readers, he trusts them with knowledge of the ceremony. In doing so, he offers some level of connection or even belonging—comparable in a small way to his own experience of new self-awareness. Welch reinforces this philosophy of connectedness in Heartsong. During a flashback to the Sun Dance, Charging Elk “heard the beat of the drum and he knew it was the heartbeat of the can gleska, where all becomes one” (64). His vision of unity suggests again the inclusiveness that Welch associates with the ceremony. Even if readers are not “changed forever,” as Welch was, their experience reading about the Sun Dance—and the culture generally—has the power to alter perceptions and foster respect for Native beliefs and customs. In an interview, when asked whether “the word” is sacred, Welch doubted whether “sacred” was the correct term, but he emphasized the ability of language to educate, entertain, and foster intimacy, adding: “Words are probably the strongest link between people. I think in any form of communication people can develop a more emotional relationship over a book. From the writer to the reader it’s a very intimate relationship” (Bellinelli). Welch fosters this relationship by detailing Native customs in print, at a time, moreover, when many prefer to keep spiritual and cultural practices out of the hands of those who might mishandle them (and, in fact, have in the past). In this way, Welch constructs a bridge between cultures—showing a trust and honesty that perhaps points to how all might become one. This transcultural bridge, of course, goes both ways.11 In The Heartsong of Charging Elk Welch demonstrates a similar connection between different spiritual systems, but he reverses the cultural direction. While Charging Elk is traveling with the “Wild West” show, he meets a French woman, named Sandrine, who gives him a picture of a man with “a woven chain of thorns” around his heart. He refers to it afterward as “the picture of the man with the bloody heart” (72). His factual description reveals that Charging Elk does not initially understand the spiritual message that Sandrine intends by the image. He sees it literally. Eventually, Charging Elk understands and accepts the image in terms of his own spiritual beliefs: “it had become part of her nagi that he must carry always, just as he always wore his badger claw necklace” (72). The gift, to Charging Elk, signifies a cross-cultural relationship—even if not necessarily intended in that way. Rather than becoming interested in Christianity, he incorporates it into his own belief system, demonstrating a respect for others’ beliefs as well as asserting equality between them: the image of Jesus is parallel to his badger claw necklace. Welch’s depiction, of course,

238

Joseph L. Coulombe

suggests a satiric intent. With its oblique reference to the many depredations done to Natives in the name of Christianity, Welch implies that Jesus does, after all, have a bloody heart. The irony fades, however, in light of Charging Elk’s genuinely sympathetic response. His redefinition of the Christ-image emphasizes an intersection of beliefs rather than a conflict between them. Welch fosters cross-cultural relationships further in Heartsong by providing information about Oglala beliefs and by exhibiting those beliefs in action. For example, as Charging Elk ponders Armond Bretueil, the man who drugged and molested him, Welch defines quite explicitly the roles of heyokas and siyokos. He does not suggest or infer, and he does not expect readers to know already how they differ, as more challenging authors might do. Rather he patiently explains that heyokas “act crazy but deep within them, they possess much power. They are to be respected but feared” (180). On the other hand, siyokos are “evil spirits” (181) and, as a result, more dangerous than the heyokas. These small gestures of explanation suggest that Welch is attempting to meet readers at their level of knowledge and teach further understanding. Moreover, Charging Elk is not quite sure whether Bretueil is heyoka or siyoko, and as a result readers are led to believe that the distinction is difficult even for those immersed in Lakota culture.12 Welch, in fact, seems to delight in his ability to foster such ambiguities about culturally specific knowledge. He rarely misses an opportunity to undermine cultural absolutes. For example, in Fools Crow readers are told that a married man should not look directly at his mother-in-law; then later Fools Crow and Heavy Shield Woman stare at each other: “now this taboo seemed far less important than the bad spirit in the boy they loved” (264). In effect, Welch demonstrates how every culture has rules, and every rule most likely has exceptions. This both prevents us from fully understanding the Blackfeet world and makes us more dependent upon the text to determine Welch’s goals. And yet if Welch sometimes provides readers with the necessary information, he at other times forces us to confront the inevitable ambiguity. For example, Fools Crow tells Boss Ribs about Fast Horse’s dream (199), even though he knows that “to tell another’s dream could make one’s own medicine go bad” (48). His change of plan takes place without explanation, demonstrating the gray area surrounding some cultural beliefs and their implementation. Likewise, when Charging Elk visits a new restaurant and finds himself surrounded by hostile American sailors, he sings his death song to escape. On the one hand readers are shown a Native utilizing an important part of his belief system to avoid danger. On the other hand even Charging Elk realizes that the song did not help him in the standard way: “He knew that the purpose of the song had become distorted into a kind of defense mechanism but he didn’t know why—only that it worked this time” (177). Both Charging Elk and Welch seem relatively comfortable with how

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

239

traditional aspects of Native culture transform themselves into something new. This both complicates our ability to comprehend the Native world in the novels and—in a way—relieves us from assuming that we require an encyclopedic knowledge of distinct Native cultures to understand the novel. Welch teaches us what we need to know. Furthermore, in both Fools Crow and Heartsong, Welch focuses on questions, doubts, and other negative reactions that individuals have regarding traditional elements of their belief systems. Even clearly admirable characters do not subscribe to a monolithic view of Blackfeet culture. For instance, despite the fact that the Blackfeet society was focused largely around raiding and war honors (as much as hunting and trading), Fools Crow vomits from his horse after a raid against Bull Shield. The danger and violence of his killing were apparently too much for him. Although he is initiated into manhood as a result, Welch does not glamorize the moment or the man, and in fact Red Paint questions the necessity of the war party, even though it seeks revenge for her father’s mutilation. Welch portrays the misgivings that would have inevitably arisen, and that potentially clash with his effort to present a warrior culture in a positive manner. In the end, however, the complications and paradoxes of Pikuni life and thought make the people and their culture more admirable, because they are more complex. Perhaps the most sensitive issue that Welch confronts is the doubt that individuals experienced regarding Blackfeet spirituality. Facing a potentially overwhelming cultural onslaught, some characters question their faith. Ridesat-the-door says despairingly: Sun Chief favors the Napikwans. Perhaps it’s because they come from the east where he rises each day to begin his journey. Perhaps they are old friends. Perhaps the Pikunis do not honor him enough, do not sacrifice enough. He no longer takes pity on us. (177)

Welch risks much by voicing such doubts so openly. Historically, much of white America would have likely agreed that Native religions were false, and undoubtedly a portion of U.S. citizens would still consider Blackfeet spirituality as quaint mythology. Welch’s portrayal confronts a harsh reality of the Indian experience—their religious misgivings13—while ultimately demonstrating how such questioning can lead to a stronger belief. Fools Crow’s journey to Feather Woman at the end of the novel is a good case in point. Along the way he doubts both his dream and his dream helper; he blames Skunk Bear—his animal helper—for betraying him; and he repeatedly doubts his ability to help his people. Yet in the end the tribal beliefs and stories more than adequately inform and support his own experiences.

240

Joseph L. Coulombe

Similar situations occur throughout Fools Crow. Heavy Shield Woman, for example, is naturally apprehensive about her decision to be Sacred Vow Woman, and she evaluates her own worth and motivation. Her self-examination is an effort to understand herself better and conduct herself more appropriately. Welch is not inviting disbelief regarding Native cultural practices but rather demonstrating the full humanity of his Indian characters, unlike works that shroud Native people and customs in mystery.14 To his credit Welch resists the urge to create perfectly ideal characters. While sometimes heroic, they are always human. Charging Elk faces similar doubts—and reassurances—about himself and his spiritual beliefs. He remembers how his friend Sees Twice had told him that the white “God Almighty” was “even stronger than Wakan Tanka.” Years later Charging Elk thinks: “Although he hadn’t believed Sees Twice then, now he wasn’t so sure. After all, the wasicuns ruled the world” (183). His isolation in France challenges his beliefs, causing him to question his conception of God. In the end, he retains his belief in Wakan Tanka, thanking the Great Spirit for sending people like Yellow Breast to help him. Despite marrying a Christian, and even attending services with her, Charging Elk does not become Christian; instead he simply demonstrates his open-mindedness to others’ beliefs. As James Clifford writes, “It is easier to register the loss of traditional orders of difference than to perceive the emergence of new ones” (15). Welch does not offer a false unity or a homogenous world; old and new differences will always exist between cultures. Instead, Welch shows the normalcy of self-questioning and how doubt is (or should be) part of all faiths. His European characters share similar moments of uncertainty, demonstrating again the connectedness of all peoples. The ultra-pious René prays regularly to the Christian figure Mary, but he acknowledges that “he had no sign that she had heard him” (266). His wife, Madeleine, admits to herself: “Sometimes his piety was a burden” (100). Likewise, the farmer Vincent Gazier responds to his wife’s illness with religious despair. After Charging Elk tells him that he will pray to Wakan Tanka for her, Gazier gains hope, saying, “‘Thank you, Charging Elk. That is all I ask. Perhaps your Great Spirit . . .’ â•›The gaunt man suddenly stopped. He had almost committed a sacrilege” (317). Apparently he had almost acknowledged the equality of their differing definitions of God—just as Charging Elk had done (and Fools Crow). By showing how individuals respond to life’s challenges in similar ways, Welch equalizes the people and their belief systems. Neither is exotic; both are normal. One of Welch’s great accomplishments in Fools Crow is that he normalizes Native people and society in a historical work that might invite romantic nostalgia. An especially noteworthy example is on the morning that Fast Horse again leaves the Pikuni camp. A blizzard had just blanketed the region,

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

241

and Welch takes the time to outline the typical activities “on almost any other day” (191) and, in the process, again invites readers into a Native world before white domination: Some of the men would go off hunting, or just exploring, always with their weapons. The women would prepare hides or continue with bead- or quillwork and gossip. The children would throw stones into the river or play with dolls or sleds. (191)

In the extended description, Welch shows domesticity and contentment without descending into romanticism. Focusing on mundane daily activities, he avoids sentimentalizing a past lifestyle and instead informs readers of its normalcy. The historical perception created by Welch extends to the present, a concern voiced by other Native writers as well. Paul Chaat Smith writes: One decade we’re invisible, another dangerous. Obsolete and quaint, a rather boring people suitable for schoolkids and family vacations, then suddenly we’re cool and mysterious. Some now regard us as keepers of planetary secrets and the only salvation for a world bent on destroying itself. Heck, we’re just plain folk, but no one wants to hear that. (Qtd. in Shanley, “Metacritical” 223)

Refusing to romanticize Native culture or people, Welch instead creates a range of characters that includes the negative. For instance, the egotistical Fast Horse rejects his culture because he fails to gain instant honor within it. The usually honorable Yellow Kidney rapes a dying Crow girl during a raid. The vindictive Owl Child endangers all Natives by obsessively seeking revenge against all white people. The jealous Running Fisher rapes his father’s wife, Kills-Close-to-the-Lake, and then engages in an adulterous affair with her. Writing a historical novel about white America’s usurpation of Native land, Welch could have focused simply on the obvious villain, but he took the more difficult path. He was willing to explore ambiguities and allow for exceptions, and he opened himself to charges that he is perpetuating negative images of Native Americans. By showing his characters’ mixed motives and bad decisions, however, Welch eludes the either/or mentality that has traditionally presented Natives as simply good or bad.15 Of course, in his effort to equalize—and to be historically accurate— Welch also shows white characters in Fools Crow as criminally small-minded (such as Captain Snelling and General Alfred Sully) and as dangerous turncoats (such as Joe Kipp). Nevertheless, he also presents some whites as fairminded, mostly the early traders but also the “long robe” painter Long Teeth and the doctor Sturgis. In Heartsong Welch described the French as “genuinely

242

Joseph L. Coulombe

sympathetic” to Natives (51), despite their fear and prejudice. In its small way this opens Welch’s story to more readers, some of whom might become defensive if they sense that the “good” and “bad” guys are entirely good or bad. Kimberly Blaeser asks the question: “What if white society were envisioned as the demonic ‘other’?” (164). Welch’s historical novels suggest that such a presentation would amount to extremism or absolutism (and perhaps would be tantamount to the racist depictions of Natives by some white pundits). In Heartsong his European and American characters have decidedly mixed motives. The fishmonger and philanthropist René fosters romantic conceptions of Indians that tend to be reductive, while also having positive liberal leanings that encourage him to help people in need. Whereas he is openly racist regarding African immigrants (165), he recognizes his complicity in Charging Elk’s murder of Armand Bretueil. Franklin Bell, an American diplomat who tries to aid Charging Elk, is motivated both by professional self-interest—“It was just business, this whole thing” (142)—and by what seems like a sincere desire to help Charging Elk return home. His contact with Charging Elk also prompts him to express private doubts about EuroAmerican society. As Bell watches him eat, he thinks: “They must have picked up the niceties of civilization. But what did they think of the white man’s civilization? Did they consider it an improvement over their own primitive ways?” (107). His questions simultaneously show an unexamined prejudice as well as a curiosity about other ways of thinking. His interest in Charging Elk’s response to “the white man’s civilization” suggests his own uneasiness about it. Like Bell, the reporter St-Cyr is both self-focused and curious, “wish[ing] desperately that he could understand what was going on inside that Indien’s head” (259). His desire to understand is admirable, yet he harbors prejudice against Natives even while he respects Charging Elk. Rather than separating Natives from whites, Welch reveals their similar thought processes, including those involving ambivalence, hatred, and pride. Among other things, individuals from both groups make identical mistakes. For instance, in Fools Crow Owl Child’s anger over Joe Clark’s insult prompts him to think: “All the Napikwans would pay for those words” (209). He does not distinguish between individual white persons; rather, he discriminates against them all, holding each accountable for Clark’s insult. Likewise, an unnamed white man traveling in winter with his son thinks fearfully of recent killings, and as he approaches the war lodge containing Yellow Kidney, he admits: “I want to kill an Indian” (244). As with Owl Child he blames an entire population for one person’s transgression; any Native will serve his purpose, not just those personally responsible for the killings. Such characterization helps equalize people, even as it exposes the lowest common denominator. Stated more positively, Welch transcends narrow definitions of either race as either wholly innocent or guilty, and thus he rejects categorical absolutes.

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

243

Despite the weight of historical evidence against white people, Welch seems ultimately to focus on the cynical motivations of humankind in general. In Killing Custer he writes: Custer’s last stand has gone down in history [unfairly] as an example of what savagery the Indians were capable of; the Massacre on the Marias [one of the closing incidents in Fools Crow] is a better example of what man is capable of doing to man. (47)

Welch would be quite justified in condemning white behavior here, particularly since massacres and other atrocities were conducted by white Americans throughout U.S. history, but he focuses instead upon the capacity for evil by people in general. Avoiding racial generalities, Welch sees the problem as a human one. Perhaps this attitude is what prompts Alan Velie to write: “The politics of Fools Crow might best be described as accommodational. Welch presents a number of viewpoints in the novel, but the most responsible and sympathetic leaders advocate compromising with the whites, chiefly on pragmatic grounds” (201). This response, however, seems unfair. Rather than “accommodational” and “compromising”—with its undertone of obliging weakness—Welch instead creates characters (both Native and non-Native) linked by their mixed motives and conflicted desires. Rather than exposing Native concessions, he shows human complexity and universality. Fools Crow, however, avoids outright cynicism and does more than demonstrate the shared ambivalence of individuals or the inevitable confrontation between groups. He also provides a positive counterbalance to the impending threat by honoring the people and culture endangered. One of the ways Welch does this is with humor. Much has been written of Indian humor, and many commentators have demonstrated how Indian humor deconstructs the pervasive stereotype of the stoic Indian—severe, joyless, wooden.16 Welch taps into this Native tradition to display the joy of Native life. His characters are often laughing and teasing. In this way he demonstrates to readers that—despite the looming danger—Natives lived healthy lives replete with a sense of fun. For example, after a council meeting focusing upon such overwhelming issues as possible extermination, religious failure, and their children’s future, the men are still capable of ending the meeting with laughter. Not consumed by the white presence in their land, they relish life and its pleasures (178). Welch prevents readers from reducing them into unfortunate historical victims deserving of nothing but pity. Throughout Fools Crow there is much bawdy humor among the young warriors who tease each other about sexual experiences (or the lack of them). Blackfeet culture appears quite masculine in Fools Crow, and the young men

244

Joseph L. Coulombe

engage in playfully competitive banter about lovers, desire, masturbation, and bestiality. Their willingness to accept such kidding points to its good-natured quality. In fact, teasing seems to be one preferred method of communication within the community. When Fools Crow asks permission to marry Red Paint, his mother states: “People will make jokes. People will say, There goes Rides-at-the-door’s son, he marries whole families” (106). Welch paints a portrait of a people who find humor in almost all things. Even Feather Woman laughs at Fools Crow when he fears that he died and went to the Sand Hills (332–333). (However, it should probably be noted that Welch is more likely to describe how Pikunis enjoy a joke rather than concoct a joke for readers to relish, a departure from the more explicit, if ironic, humor in Winter in the Blood.) Welch’s authorial instinct often seems to be levity in the face of tragedy, even when it involves typically sacrosanct topics such as respecting elders. In an exchange between Fools Crow and Raven, Welch deflates the exaggerated reverence for elders that is simultaneously genuine and clichéd, a trope of sorts that Robert Dale Parker terms “worn generalizations” (1). Discussing human death, Fools Crow solemnly intones the benefits of continual death (as opposed to temporary death), and Raven asks: “‘Did your grandfather tell you that?’ [Fools Crow gravely responds:] ‘He was a wise man.’ [Raven rejoins:] ‘Not always.’ Raven laughs” (163). Whereas Fools Crow displays the proper veneration for his grandfather, Raven’s comment humanizes the man, and he goes on to describe the grandfather as once comically poor and luckless. Fools Crow shows a profound respect for the “long-ago people,” but Welch—in true trickster fashion (here, in fact, using Trickster)—takes the opportunity to deflate a truism that might become as hackneyed as the verity “Natives-respect-nature.”17 In Heartsong Welch weighs in briefly on the same issue. During a Christmas dinner Charging Elk and René’s widowed mother seem to share a secret joke amid much laughter, a joke that Charging Elk admits he does not quite understand. On his way out, the grandmother “laughed and made a gesture that looked disturbingly like the Lakota sign for fucking” (209). Again eschewing stale images of august elders, Welch humorously breaks stereotypes and simultaneously lessens differences between cultures. Ultimately Welch seems more interested in displaying similarities between people than in exposing disagreements or publicizing concessions. Toward this goal, he stresses the importance of community repeatedly in both Fools Crow and Heartsong. Individual action is valued, but primarily insofar as it contributes to the larger good. In Fools Crow Fast Horse enriches only himself with raids that jeopardize the lives of other Natives, but Fools Crow risks his own life to gain a vision of the tribe’s future. Likewise the Sacred Vow Woman at the Sun Dance ceremony represents the entire community:

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

245

“If you are successful, the Pikunis will prosper and enjoy favor with the spirit world. If you fail, if you are not strong or virtuous enough, great harm will come to us” (102). Moreover Welch ends the novel, not with the massacre, but with the spring rains beginning to fall on a ceremonial dance conducted by Mik-api with the rest of the community. Like Fools Crow’s infant Butterfly, these images promise renewal and connection: the rain indicates their link to the quickening world (including the blackhorns in the novel’s final sentence) after the severe winter; and the ceremony promises rejuvenation to the Native community, an expansive focus that increasingly overshadows Mik-api and Fools Crow in the closing paragraphs. The people, not the individuals, will survive, and Welch completes the novel by pointing to the future rather than the past and thus offering hope to all readers who value community and connection. Heartsong highlights a sense of community in ways that are both subtler than Fools Crow and yet more obviously cross-cultural. Charging Elk increasingly finds acceptance in French society. Employed loading ships, he joins the union: And they accepted Charging Elk as one of them, a member of the union, in a way that he hadn’t been used to. [. . .] And he felt, for the first time since he had left the Stronghold, that he was a part of a group that looked out for each other. And he liked it. (349)

Charging Elk’s willingness to join French society springs from his understanding of cultural connection that he learned in the Stronghold. He had, after all, promised René’s son, Mathias, that they will travel together to America: “Charging Elk had assured him that one day he could go to the land of the Oglalas and become a brother by ceremony” (171). To Charging Elk, inclusion in different communities is fluid. He accepts the idea that such connections are inevitable and even desired. His love for and marriage to the Frenchwoman Nathalie suggests the depth of his connection to his new world, and their expectant child symbolizes a merging of cultures and a promise for the future. As Charging Elk states, “My wife is one of them and my heart is her heart. She is my life now and soon we will have another life and the same heart will sing in all of us” (367). Both Fools Crow and Charging Elk come across as compassionate and flexible thinkers. They show self-respect and strength in the face of adversity and provide examples of men who build upon a solid cultural foundation to grow into a changing world. Despite its dangers and restrictions, they live freely, bridging the gap between cultures and exerting influence upon those around them. To this end, their stories are liberating and empowering for readers as well, and they attest to the role of literature to make the world a

246

Joseph L. Coulombe

more inclusive and humane place. By shaping their stories in this manner, Welch offers a modest revision to current efforts that seem to downplay the significance of literature as a cultural force for good. Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, who advocate appropriately for an activist agenda from writers and scholars, tend to view literature as potentially damaging diversion from the important work waiting to be done: “Not enough is being written about tribal needs and concerns, but an inordinate amount of attention is focused on fiction” (3). Mihesuah makes the case more pointedly: “many fiction writers are apolitical and do not threaten readers; therefore, ‘lit-critters’ can make careers studying Natives without lifting a finger to help solve tribal problems” (38).18 Rather than viewing critics as “studying Natives”—which implies objectification and false superiority—we might better understand “lit-critters” as learning from Natives, as being put in the position of student. Even the most innocuous art can be political; a poem about a flower becomes a radical statement if presented properly. Welch, in fact, uses fiction to educate readers about American history and, as I’ve argued, about the human relationships and connections that contributed to past failures and that might lead to future successes—for Natives and for all people. Here in the pages of Studies in American Indian Literatures it is important to state expressly that literature and the study of literature—in its myriad forms—can serve a greater good. The state of Native American studies has benefited tremendously from the so-called Native American Renaissance and even owes its existence in part to the literary outpouring of Native writers, despite the dangers of oversimplification and misinterpretation. Without N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch as well as the many other Native writers—and the high level of attention given them by scholars and critics—public knowledge of social, political, and legal issues important to Native activists would be much lower. If anything, we should work to expand the audience for Native writers, not limit their influence and dismiss them (and their promoters) as inconsequential. Read with an open mind (or a good teacher/critic), Welch’s historical fiction—and literature generally—can change the world one person at a time, which is, practically, the only way to change the world. Daniel Heath Justice expresses it well: “Understanding art for life’s sake aids all Indigenous peoples, including the literary scholars among us, to decolonize our world in mind as well as body, to dismantle the ideas and forces that tear us into pieces.” (118). As readers and scholars of literature, we should continue to focus conscientiously on the literary expressions of Native writers. They have taught us important lessons; they have, by extension, educated our students; and in turn our students have influenced others (sometimes as teachers themselves). Welch would likely appreciate the string of connection and understanding initiated by his writings.

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

247

No t e s ╇ 1. Many critics explain how elements of Native culture are central to understanding Fools Crow. For example, Nora Barry outlines how Welch “retells and extends traditional Blackfeet myths, and connects his hero to these myths and to historical events” (3). Kathryn Shanley argues that reading dreams “comprises an indigenous science of probability” (“Lady Luck” 94), which explains Fools Crow’s growth as well as his contribution to the community. Bruce Murphree posits that Welch uses Indian legends “to clarify the dangers of straying too far from Pikuni tribal heritage” (186). ╇ 2. See Mihesuah’s Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (1998) and Mihesuah and Wilson’s Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities (2004). ╇ 3. Louis Owens laments the way that many so-called postcolonial critics ignore “the existence of a resistance literature arising from indigenous, colonized inhabitants of the Americas” (“As If ” 13). ╇ 4. Jace Weaver has recently called upon scholars of Native American studies to do what Welch does in his fiction: “It must seek to understand the material from the perspective of the Natives. . . . History of white/Native interaction told largely or exclusively from the perspective of the settler colonizers is not NAS” (236). Kimberly M. Blaeser also writes of Native writers’ focus on history: “By a deft twist of the popular vision of history, they submerge their readers in the ‘what ifs’ of historical interpretation” (163). ╇ 5. Kathryn Shanley writes: “Changing the hearts and minds of readers habituated to see ‘Indians’ as exotic Others requires a shift in mainstream worldview, the paradigm through which social interactions and cross-cultural perceptions fall categorically into place” (“Metacritical” 225). ╇ 6. Andrea Opitz, who translated Fools Crow into German, writes that Welch’s language “forces the reader to recognize and adapt to his or her own marginal position in relation to the particular text” (126). ╇ 7. Louis Owens writes that Welch’s use of Blackfeet language “underscores the Indians’ sense of still controlling their world, of being the privileged center within this world wherein the whites are ‘other’” (Other Destinies 158). ╇ 8. Sidner Larson describes his position similarly: “[M]y lifework has evolved to a place of attempting to interpret to predominantly white middle-class students those American Indian worldviews that I believe may be helpful to them” (4). ╇ 9. Paula Gunn Allen makes this charge against Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, writing that “the story she lays alongside the novel is a clan story, and is not to be told outside of the clan” because such stories can be “objectified, explained, detailed and analyzed” as though “they were simply curios, artifacts, fetishes” (383). Likewise Peter Whitely writes, “Dissemination of ritual knowledge, either orally to unentitled parties or ipso facto in published accounts, violates ritual sanctity and effectiveness and may damage the spiritual health of the community” (qtd. in Krupat 21). 10. William Farr describes how early-twentieth-century observers wrote of the “heathenism and bloodshed” of the Sun Dance celebration (66–68). 11. Many writers have written about two-way cultural influences. Historian James W. Loewen outlines this “syncretism—blending elements of two different cultures to create something new” (103). Craig Womack also rejects “the supremacist

248

Joseph L. Coulombe

notion that assimilation can only go in one direction” (12). David Moore notes how both Gerald Vizenor and Vine Deloria emphasize identity building as a process of “change and exchange,” adding, “If power is not a one-way street, Native writers can also redistribute powerlessness across the colonial divide in the name of reversing the present and past” (70). 12. When I presented these ideas at the 2004 Western Literature Association Conference in Big Sky, Montana, an audience member (who self-identified as Native American) indicated that some Lakotas felt that Welch failed to define these terms accurately in Heartsong. 13. James Loewen argues that many Natives abandoned their spiritual belief systems after debilitating epidemics swept through their regions (81). 14. Robert Gish, on the other hand, argues that Welch fosters mystery within many of his works. 15. David Murray notes: “The concern for mixedness, for impurities of all sorts, whether formal or racial can be seen not so much as a refusal or betrayal of an Indian heritage or identity as a refusal of the limiting and simplified purities and archaisms of mainstream representations of Indians” (90). 16. See Kenneth Lincoln, Kimberly Blaeser, and also my article on Sherman Alexie. 17. Vine Deloria Jr. writes, “[T]he relationship of Indians with the natural world has become so much of a cliché that it no longer communicates anything except the need for petting zoos for urban children” (viii). 18. Cornel D. Pewewardy also expresses suspicion regarding literary studies and its practitioners: “Literary criticism appears to be emerging as a ‘safe’ field, one that supports anyone who claims to be Native” (205).

Wor k s Ci t e d Allen, Paula Gunn. “Problems in Teaching Silko’s Ceremony.” American Indian Quarterly 14.4 (Fall 1990): 379–386. Barry, Nora. “‘A Myth to Be Alive’: James Welch’s Fools Crow.” MELUS 17.1 (Spring 1991): 3–18. Bellinelli, Matteo. “Video: Native American Novelists—James Welch.” Films for the Humanities & Sciences: A Production of TSI Swiss Television. 1995. Blaeser, Kimberly M. “The New ‘Frontier’ of Native American Literature: Dis-Arming History with Tribal Humor.” Native-American Writers. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. 161–173. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Coulombe, Joseph L. “The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie’s Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” American Indian Quarterly 26.1 (Winter 2002): 94–115. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Preface. Earth’s Mind: Essays in Native Literature. By Roger Dunsmore. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977. Farr, William. The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945: A Photographic History of Cultural Survival. Foreword by James Welch. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984. Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding

249

Harjo, Joy, and Gloria Bird, eds. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America. New York: Norton, 1998. Justice, Daniel Heath. “Seeing (and Reading) Red: Indian Outlaws in the Ivory Tower.” Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities. Ed. Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 100–123. Krupat, Arnold. The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Larson, Sidner. Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing. Seattle: University of â•›Washington Press, 2000. Lincoln, Kenneth. Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Simon, 1995. McFarland, Ron, ed. James Welch. Lewiston, ID: Confluence, 1986. Mihesuah, Devon Abbott, ed. Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Mihesuah, Devon Abbott, and Angela Cavender Wilson, eds. Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities. Lincoln: University of â•›Nebraska Press, 2004 . Moore, David. “Return of the Buffalo: Cultural Representation as Cultural Property.” Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations. Ed. Gretchen M. Bataille. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 52–78. Murphree, Bruce. “Welch’s Fools Crow.” Explicator 52.3 (Spring 1994): 186–187. Murray, David. “Representation and Cultural Sovereignty: Some Case Studies.” Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations. Ed. Gretchen M. Bataille. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 80–97. Opitz, Andrea. “James Welch’s Fools Crow and the Imagination of Pre-Colonial Space.” American Indian Quarterly 24.1 (Winter 2000): 126–140. Owens, Louis. “As If an Indian Were Really an Indian: Native American Voices and Postcolonial Theory.” Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations. Ed. Gretchen M. Bataille. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 11–25. ——— . Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Parker, Robert Dale. The Invention of Native American Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pewewardy, Cornel D. “So You Think You Hired an ‘Indian’ Faculty Member? The Ethnic Fraud Paradox in Higher Education.” Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities. Ed. Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 200–217. Schorcht, Blanca. Storied Voices in Native American Texts: Harry Robinson, Thomas King, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: Routledge, 2003. Shanley, Kathryn. “Lady Luck or Mother Earth? Gaming as a Trope in Plains Indian Cultural Traditions.” wicazo sa review: A Journal of Native American Studies 15.2 (2000): 93–101. ——— . “Metacritical Frames of Reference in Studying American Indian Literature: An Afterword.” Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and

250

Joseph L. Coulombe

Literary Appropriations. Ed. Gretchen M. Bataille. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 224–226. Velie, Alan. “The Indian Historical Novel.” Native-American Writers. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. 195–209. Weaver, Jace. “More Light Than Heat: The Current State of Native American Studies.” American Indian Quarterly 31.2 (2007): 233–255. Welch, James. Fools Crow. New York: Penguin, 1986. ——— . The Heartsong of Charging Elk. New York: Doubleday, 2000. ——— , with Paul Stekler. Killing Custer. New York: Norton, 1994. Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Chronology

1762

A Short Narrative, the autobiography of Samson Occom (Mohegan).

1772

Mr Occom’s Address to His Indian Brethren: On the day that Moses Paul, an Indian, was executed at New Haven, on the 2d of September, 1772, for the murder of Moses Cook, by Samson Occom. 19 editions published over the next 30 years.

1774

A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations, compiled by Samson Occom.

1827

“Journal of a Mission to the Western Tribes of Indians,” by Hendrick Aupaumut. Written 1791.

1829

A Son of the Forest. The Experience of William Apes, a Native of the Forest. Comprising a Notice of the Pequot Tribe of Indians. Written by Himself, published by the author (Pequot).

1831

The Increase in the Kingdom of Christ and Autobiography, by William Apes (variant spelling of Apess).

1833

Experience of Five Christian Indians of the Pequod Tribe, by William Apes. Includes “Experience of the Missionary’s Consort, Written by Herself,” by Mary Apess (variant spelling of Apes).

251

252

Chronology

1834

Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak or Black Hawk, autobiography of Sauk leader Black Hawk as dictated to interpreter LeClair; edited by Illinois journalist John B. Patterson.

1836

Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon, in Federal Street, Boston, by William Apes.

1841

A Collection of Chippeway and English Hymns, for the use of the Native Indians, by Peter Jones (Missassaugua Ojibwe).

1847

The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh: A Young Indian Chief of the Ojebwa Nation, by George Copway (Ojibwe).

1850

The Ojibway Conquest, a Tale of the Northwest by Kah-gega-gah-bowh and The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation, by George Copway.

1851

Running sketches of men and places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland, by George Copway.

1854

The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, by John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee).

1858

Indian Art and Indian History, by George Copway.

1861

History of the Ojibway Indians; with Especial Reference to Their Conversion to Christianity, by Peter Jones.

1868

Poems, by John Rollin Ridge.

1872

The Manners, Customs, Traditions, and Present Conditions of the Civilized Indians of the Indian Territory, by Elias Cornelis Boudinot (Cherokee).

1883

Life Among the Piutes. Their Wrongs and Claims, by Sari Winnemucca (Paiute).

1885

History of the Ojibway People, by William Whipple Warren (Minnesota Ojibwe).

1887

History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan, by Andrew J. Blackbird (Ottawa chief).

1891

Wynema: A Child of the Forest, novel by Sophia Alice Callahan (Creek). Probably the first novel by a Native woman.

1893

A Study of Omaha Music, by Francis LaFlesche (Omaha).

Chronology

253

1899

Queen of the Woods (O-gi-maw-kwe mit-i-gwa-ki), autobiography by Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi).

1900

The Indian Problem, from the Indian’s Standpoint, by Andrew J. Blackbird.

1901–1902

“Soft-Hearted Sioux,” and “Trial Path: An Indian Romance,” by Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Sioux), published in Harper’s; “Warrior’s Daughter” published in Everybody’s magazine.

1902

Indian Boyhood, autobiography of Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman, Dakota Sioux).

1904

Red Hunters and the Animal People, short stories by Charles Eastman.

1906

Geronimo’s Story of His Life, as told to S. M. Barrett.

1910

Poems of Alexander Lawrence Posey, Creek Indian Bard (Creek/ Muscogee), collected and arranged by Mrs. Minnie H. Posey.

1916

From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian, by Charles Eastman.

1921

American Indian Stories, biographies by Zitkala-Ša (Dakota Sioux).

1925

Wild Harvest: A Novel of Transition Days in Oklahoma, by John M(ilton) Oskison (Cherokee).

1927

Cogewea, the Haff-’Blood. A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, by Mourning Dove (Humi-she-ma/Christine Quintasket, an Okanogan).

1931

Woodland Princess, a Book of 24 Poems, by Natachee Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee).

1932

Black Elk Speaks, as told to John G. Neihardt; Wah’ kon-tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road, by John Joseph Mathews (Osage); Dakota Texts, folklore collected by Ella Carr Deloria (Yankton Sioux).

1933

Coyote Stories, by Mourning Dove.

1934

Sundown, novel by John Joseph Mathews.

1935

Brothers Three, novel by John Milton Oskison.

254

Chronology

1936

The Surrounded, novel by D’Arcy McNickle (Salish/Kutenai).

1942

Sun Chief; the Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, by Don C. Talayesva (Hopi).

1953–1954

The Umbilical Cord, poems, and The Witch Deer. Poems of the Oklahoma Indian, by Maggie Culver Fry (Cherokee).

1958

Dead Letters Sent, and Other Poems, by Maurice Kenny (Mohawk).

1962

Two Wings the Butterfly; Haiku Poems in English, by Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa).

1965

Owl in the Cedar Tree, novel by Natachee Scott Momaday.

1968

House Made of Dawn, novel by N(atachee) Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee); Escorts to White Earth: 1868–1968: 100 Year Reservation, by Gerald Vizenor.

1969

House Made of Dawn wins 1969 Pulitzer Prize. The Way to Rainy Mountain, novel by N. Scott Momaday; Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, by Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux).

1971

Heaved From the Earth, poems by Besmilr Brigham (Choctaw).

1972

Seven Arrows, novel by Hyemeyohsts Storm (Cheyenne/Crow).

1974

Like Spirits of the Past Trying to Break Out and Walk West, poems by Minerva Allen (Assiniboine); Angle of Geese and Other Poems, by N. Scott Momaday; Winter in the Blood, novel by James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre); Going for the Rain: Poems, by Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo); Ascending Red Cedar Moon, poems by Duane Niatum (Klallum); The Owl’s Song, novel by Janet Campbell Hale (Coeur d’Alene/Lakota).

1975

Conversations from the Nightmare, poems by Carol Lee Sanchez (Laguna Pueblo/Sioux), nominated by the American Academy of Poets for the Edgar Allan Poe Award. The Last Song, poems by Joy Harjo (Creek); The Blind Lion, poems by Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo/ Sioux/Lebanese); Flow: Poems, by Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki).

1976

To Frighten a Storm, poems by Gladys Cardiff (Eastern Cherokee).

Chronology

255

1977

Ceremony, novel by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna); Then Badger Said This, poems by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow/ Creek/Reservation Dakota).

1978

Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, novel by Gerald Vizenor; Back Then Tomorrow, short stories by Peter Blue Cloud (Mohawk); Wind From an Enemy Sky, novel by D’Arcy McNickle.

1979

Calling Myself Home, poems by Linda Hogan (Chickasaw); The Death of Jim Loney, poems by James Welch; The Good Message of Handsome Lake, poems by Joseph Bruchac.

1981

There Is No Word For Goodbye, poems by Mary Tall Mountain (Athabaskan), wins a Pushcart Prize. Lost Copper, poems by Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok), nominated for the American Book Award. Storyteller, novel by Leslie Marmon Silko; Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent, by Gerald Vizenor; Song of Heyoehkah, novel by Hyemeyohsts Storm.

1982

Seasonal Woman, poems by Luci Tapahonso (Navajo). “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” a short story by Louise Erdrich, wins the first Nelson Algren Award. Gorky Park, novel by Martin Cruz Smith (Pueblo/Yaqui).

1983

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, novel by Paula Gunn Allen; Harold of Orange, film and unpublished screenplay by Gerald Vizenor. Fightin’: New and Collected Stories, by Simon Ortiz.

1984

Love Medicine and Jacklight, novels by Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa).

1985

Iroquois Stories: Heroes and Heroines, Monsters and Magic, by Joseph Bruchac; Inherit the Blood: Abbey of the Bear, poems by Barney Bush (Shawnee/Cayuga Iroquois); The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories, by Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee/Otoe).

1986

The Sun Is Not Merciful: Short Stories, wins 1986 American Bock Award. Fools Crow: a Novel, by James Welch; The Beet Queen, novel by Louise Erdrich.

1987

Griever: An American Monkey King in China, novel by Gerald Vizenor; The Jailing of Cecilia Capture, novel by Janet Campbell Hale.

256

Chronology

1988

Waterlily, novel by Ella Carr Deloria; Ghost Singer, novel by Anna Lee Walters.

1990

Mean Spirit, novel by Linda Hogan; Trigger Dance, short stories by Diane Glancy (Cherokee); The Power of Horses and Other Stories, by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn; Lakota Woman, biography by Mary Brave Bird (Lakota).

1991

Lakota Woman wins 1991 American Book Award. Monster Slayer: A Navajo Folktale, by Vee Browne (Navajo); Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories, by Gerald Vizenor; From the River’s Edge, novel by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn; Food & Spirits, Stories, by Beth Brant (Mohawk).

1992

The Sharpest Sight, novel by Louis Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee); Red Square, novel by Martin Cruz Smith; Grandmothers of Light: A Medicine Woman’s Source Book, nonfiction by Paula Gunn Allen.

1993

A Chief and Her People, autobiography of Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee); Monster Birds: A Navajo Folktale, by Vee Browne; Dawn Land, novel by Joseph Bruchac; The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, short stories by Alexie Sherman (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene); An Eagle Nation, poems by Carter Revard (Osage).

1994

The Bone Game, novel by Louis Owens; Lightning Bolt, novel by Hyemeyohsts Storm; The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, novel by Paula Gunn Allen; After and Before the Lightning, poems by Simon Ortiz; The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, poems by Joy Harjo; The Light People, novel by Gordon Henry (Chippewa).

1995

Solar Storms, novel by Linda Hogan; Monkey Secret, novel by Diane Glancy; Completing the Circle, biography by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve (Lakota Sioux).

1996

Indian Killer, mystery by Alexie Sherman, wins the 1996 American Book Award. Nightland, novel by Louis Owens; Rose, novel by Martin Cruz Smith; Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, by Diane Glancy; Bad Boys and Black Sheep: Fateful Tales from the West, by Robert Franklin Gish (Cherokee); Tales of Burning Love, novel by Louise Erdrich.

1997

Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina, autobiography of Maria Tallchief (Osage/Scots-Irish), with Larry Kaplan;

Chronology

257

Remnants of the First Earth, novel by Ray Young Bear (Mesquaije Fox); Blue Horses Rush In, poems by Luci Tapahonso. 1998

Antelope Wife, by Louise Erdrich; The Waters Between: A Novel of the Dawn Land, by Joseph Bruchac; Power, by Linda Hogan; The Dance House: Stories from Rosebud, by Joseph Marshall; Turtle Belly, by Joel Monture; Bad Medicine, by Ronald B. Querry; Josanie’s War: A Chiricahua Apache Novel, by Karl H. Schlesier; Survivor’s Medicine: Short Stories, by E. Donald Two-Rivers.

1999

The Voice That Was in Travel: Stories, by Diane Glancy; Truth & Bright Water, by Thomas King; Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories, by Simon J. Ortiz; Gardens in the Dunes: A Novel by Leslie Marmon Silko; Hiawatha, by David Truer.

2000

Toughest Indian in the World, by Sherman Alexie; Killing Time with Strangers, by W. S. Penn; This is the World, by W. S. Penn; Roofwalker, by Susan Power; Grandpa was a Cowboy and An Indian and Other Stories, by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve; Chancers: A Novel, by Gerald Robert Vizenor; The Heartsong of Charging Elk: A Novel, by James Welch.

2001

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, by Louise Erdrich; The Man Who Heard the Land, by Diane Glancy.

2002

Designs of the Night Sky, by Diane Glancy; A Pipe for February: A Novel, by Charles H. Red Corn; The Education of Ruby Loonfoot, by Paxton Riddle.

2003

Ten Little Indians, by Sherman Alexie; Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea by Diane Glancy; All the Beautiful Sinners, by Stephen Graham Jones; Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, by Gerald Vizenor.

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist; How to Read and Why (2000); Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002); Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003); Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004); and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In 1999 Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.

E. Shelley Reid is associate professor of English and director of the composition department at George Mason University. He has written articles about composition and multicultural approaches to literature. Frederick E. Hoxie is Swanlund Professor of American social and political history at the University of Illinois, where he teaches Native American history and race and ethnicity. 259

260

Contributors

Sheila Hassell Hughes is associate professor of English and department chair at the University of Dayton. She is an associate editor of Literature and Theology. She has written articles on women’s literature and feminist theology. Jason W. Stevens is assistant professor of English at Harvard University. His 2005 dissertation at Columbia University was “Warding Off Innocence: Original Sin and American Culture in the Cold War.” Joseph L. Coulombe is associate professor of English at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. He wrote Mark Twain and the American West (2003). A. M. Regier is associate professor of English at Bethel College. She has written articles on Native American literature. Her research interests are contemporary multicultural narrative, literary theory, and gender studies. Gary Totten is associate professor of English at North Dakota State University. He has written articles on Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Booker T. Washington, and Ida B. Wells, and he edited Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (2007). Angelique V. Nixon is an assistant professor in residence in the University of Connecticut women’s studies program. She is the author of the blog conscious vibration . Elizabeth Gargano is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She wrote Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2007). Caroline Wigginton is an assistant instructor in the division of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas, Austin.

Bibliography

Adamson, Joni. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.

Aithal, S. K. “The Redemptive Return: Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,” North Dakota Quarterly, Volume 53, Number 2 (Spring 1985): pp. 160–172.

Allen, Chadwick. Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

Allen, Minerva. Like Spirits of the Past Trying to Break Out and Walk West. Big Timber, Mont.: Seven Buffaloes Press, 1974.

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Blind Lion. Berkeley, Cal.: Thorp Springs Press, 1975.

——— . “‘Border’ Studies: The Intersection of Gender and Color,” in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gibaldi (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), pp. 203–319. ——— . A Cannon Between My Knees. New York: Strawberry Press, 1981.

——— . Coyote’s Daylight Trip. Albuquerque, N. Mex.: La Confluencia, 1978.

——— . “The Mythopoeic Vision in Native American Literature: The Problem of Myth,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Volume 1 (1974): pp. 1–13. ——— . The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

——— . Shadow Country. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center Series, 1982. ——— . Star Child. Marvin, S.Dak.: Blue Cloud Press, 1981.

——— . The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. New York: Spinsters Ink, 1983.

261

262

Bibliography

Anderson, Eric Gary. American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.

Apes(s), William. Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon in Federal Street, Boston. 1836. Brookfield, Mass.: L. A. Dexter, 1985.

——— . Experience of Five Christian Indians of the Pequod Tribe. Boston: William Apess, 1837.

——— . Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: Or, The Pretended Riot Explained. 1835. Stanfordville, N.Y.: E. M. Coleman, 1979. ——— . The Kingdom of Christ. A Sermon. New York: G. E. Bunce, 1831.

——— . On Our Own Ground: Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. ——— . A Son of the Forest and Other Writings. 1829. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Barnett, Marianne. “Dreamstuff: Erdrich’s Love Medicine,” North Dakota Quarterly, Volume 56, Number 1 (Winter 1988): pp. 82–93.

Bataille, Gretchen M. Review of Ancestral Voice, in Choice, Volume 27 (November 1989): p. 493.

Blicksilver, Edith. “Traditionalism versus Modernity: Leslie Silko on American Indian Women,” Southwest Review, Volume 64, Number 2 (1979): pp. 149–160.

Bloom, Harold. Native-American Writers. Philadelphia, Penn.: Chelsea House, 1998.

Brill de Ramírez, Susan Berry. Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Brooks, Joanna. American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2003. Brooks, Lisa. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Bruchac, Joseph. Return of the Sun: Native American Tales from the Northeast Woodlands Freedom. Cal.: Crossing Press, 1989. ——— . Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1995.

——— , ed. Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987. Brumble, H. David, III. An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “Seek the House of Relatives,” Blue Cloud Quarterly, Volume 29, Number 4 (1983).

Bibliography

263

——— . Then Badger Said This. New York: Vantage, 1977.

Craig, David M. “Beyond Assimilation: James Welch and the Indian Dilemma,” North Dakota Quarterly, Volume 53, Number 2 (Spring 1985): pp. 182–190.

Danielson, Linda. “The Storytellers in Storyteller,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 2 (Fall 1989): pp. 21–31.

Davidson, Arnold E., Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews. Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

DeFlyer, Joseph E. Review of The Ancient Child, in Choice, Volume 27 (↜渀June 1990): p. 1679. Deloria, Vine, Jr. God Is Red. A Native View of Religion. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1994. ——— . The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979.

——— . Red Earth, White Lies. Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Dickinson, Peter. Here is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Dreese, Donelle N. Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental and American Indian Literatures. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.

Dunsmore, Roger. Earth’s Mind: Essays in Native Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

Elliott, Michael A. The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Erdrich, Louise. Baptism of Desire: Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. ——— . The Beet Queen. New York: Holt, 1986.

——— . The Bingo Palace. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

——— . Jacklight. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984.

——— . Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984. ——— . Tracks. New York: Holt, 1988.

——— , and Michael Dorris. The Crown of Columbus. New York: HarperCollins. 1991.

Evers, Lawrence J. “The Killing of a New Mexican State Trooper: Ways of â•›Telling a Historical Event,” The Wicazo: A Journal of Indian Studies, Volume 1, Number 1 (Spring 1985): pp. 17–25.

Fitz, Karsten. Negotiating History and Culture: Transculturation in Contemporary Native American Fiction. Frankfurt, Ger.: Peter Lang, 2001. Flavin, Louise. “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Loving Over Time and Distance,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 1989): pp. 55–64.

264

Bibliography

George, Jan. “Interview with Louise Erdrich,” North Dakota Quarterly, Volume 53, Number 2 (Spring Z4 1985): pp. 240–246.

——— . Review of Co-ge-wea, in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Volume I, Number 2 (1982): pp. 217–221.

Gruber, Eva. Humor in Contemporary Native North American Literature: Reimagining Nativeness. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008. Harjo, Joy. The Last Song. Las Cruces, N. Mex.: Puerta del Sol, 1975.

——— . She Had Some Horses. New York & Chicago: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1982. ——— . What Moon Drove Me to This? Berkeley, Cal.: Reed & Canvas, 1978.

Hebebrand, Christina M. Native American and Chicano/a Literature of the American Southwest: Intersections of Indigenous Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hicks, Jack, James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Al Young, eds. Literature of California, I: Native American Beginnings to 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hobson, Geary. The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981.

Hoffert, Barbara. Review of Tracks, in Library Journal, Volume 113 (September 1, 1988): p. 182

Hogan, Linda. Calling Myself Home. Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1979. ——— . Daughters, I Love You. Denver: Loretto Heights College, 1981.

——— . Eclipse. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center Series, 1983. ——— , ed. Frontiers. A Special Issue on Native American Women, Volume 6, Number 3 (1981).

Horne, Dee. Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Hymes, Dell. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Jahner, Elaine. “Allies in the Word Wars: Vizenor’s Uses of Contemporary Critical Theory,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 9, Number 2 (Spring 1985): pp. 64–69.

——— . “A Laddered Rain-Bearing Rug: The Poetry of Paula Gunn Allen,” Women and Western American Literature, eds. Susan Rosowski and Helen Stauffer. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1982. Jaskoski, Helen. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Katanski, Amelia V. Learning to Write ‘Indian’: The Boarding-School Experience and American Indian Literature. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.

Bibliography

265

Kidwell, Clara Sue, Alan Velie, and Robert Con Davis-Undiano. Native American Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Konkle, Maureen. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Lincoln, Kenneth. Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

——— . Native American Renaissance. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.

——— . Speak Like Singing: Classics of Native American Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Maddox, Lucy. Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Macdonald, Gina, Andrew Macdonald, and Mary Ann Sheridan. Shaman or Sherlock? The Native American Detective. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Mathews, John Joseph. The Osages, Children of the Middle Waters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961, 1973.

——— . Sundown. New York: Longmans, Green, 1934; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. ——— . Talking to the Moon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1945, 1981.

——— . Wah’ kon-tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932, 1968, 1981. McFarland, Ronald E., ed. James Welch. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1986.

McKenzie, James. “Lipsha’s Good Road Home: The Revival of Chippewa Culture in Love Medicine,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Volume 10, Number 3 (1986): pp. 53–63. McNickle, D’Arcy. Indian Man: A Life of Oliver LaFarge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.

——— , and Harold E. Fey. Indians and Other Americans. Two Ways of Life Meet. New and revised edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

——— . The Indian Tribes of United States: Ethnic and Cultural Survival. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.

——— . Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

——— . Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize. Illus. by Allan C. Houser. Philadelphia: Winston, 1954. ——— . The Surrounded. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936.

266

Bibliography

——— . They Came Here First. The Epic of the American Indian. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1949.

——— . Wind from an Enemy Sky. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978.

Momaday, N(atachee). Scott. The Ancient Child. New York: Doubleday, 1989. ——— . Angle of Geese and Other Poems. Boston: Godine, 1974.

——— . Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring. Illus. by David Muench. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973.

——— . The Gourd Dancer (poems with drawings by the author). New York: Harper & Row, 1976. ——— . House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

——— . “The Man Made of Words,” Indian Voices: The First Convocation of American Indian Scholars. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970. ——— . The Names: A Memoir. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

“Native American Authors Project,” The Internet Public Library. . Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

Nelson, Robert M. “Snake and Eagle: Abel’s Disease and the Landscape of House Made of Dawn,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 1, Number 2 (Fall 1989): pp. 1–20.

“North American Native Authors Catalog,” The Internet Public Library. . Owens, Louis. Bone Game. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.

——— . The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

——— . “The ‘Map of the Mind’: D’Arcy McNickle and the American Indian Novel,” Western American Literature, Volume 19, Number 4 (Winter 1985): pp. 275–283. ——— . Nightland. New York: Dutton, 1996.

——— . Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. ——— . The Sharpest Sight. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

——— . Wolfsong. Albuquerque, N. Mex.: West End Press, 1991.

Ortiz, Simon. Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature. Tsaile, Ariz.: Navajo Community College Press, 1983.

Ottery, Jim. Wisconsin Indian Literature: Anthology of Native Voices. Ed. Kathleen Tigerman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Parker, Robert Dale. The Invention of Native American Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Penn, W. S. Feathering Custer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Bibliography

267

Pulitano, Elvira. Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Purdy, John Lloyd. Word Ways: The Novels of D’Arcy McNickle. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990.

Rabinowitz, Paula. “Naming, Magic, and Documentary: The Subversion of the Narrative in Song of Solomon, Ceremony, and China Men,” in Feminist ReVisions, eds. Vivian Patraka and Louise Tilly. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983, pp. 26–42. Rainwater, Catherine. Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformation of Native American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

——— . “Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich,” American Literature, Volume 62, Number 3 (1990): pp. 405–422.

Regier, Willis G., ed. Masterpieces of American Indian Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Rose, Wendy. Academic Squaw: Reports to the World from the Ivory Tower. Marvin, S.Dak.: Blue Cloud Press, 1977.

——— . Hopi Roadrunner Dancing. Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1973. ——— . Long Division, A Tribal History. Brooklyn: Strawberry Press, 1976, 1982.

——— . Lost Copper. Morongo Indian Reservation: Malki Museum Press, 1980.

——— . What Happened When That Hopi Hit New York. New York: Contact H Publications, 1983. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. Literatures of the American Indian. New York: Chelsea House, 1991.

Ruppert, James. D’Arcy McNickle. Boise State University Western Writers Series, no. 83. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1988.

——— . “Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Contemporary Native American Fiction,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume 28, Number 2 (1986): pp. 209–255. ——— . “Paula Gunn Allen and Joy Harjo: Closing the Distance Between Personal and Mythic Space,” American Indian Quarterly, Volume 7, Number 1 (1983): pp. 27–40.

Sá, Lúcia. Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Salaita, Steven, and Peter Gran. The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Sanchez, Carol Lee. Conversations from the Nightmare. San Francisco: Casa Editorial, 1975.

——— . Coyote’s Journal. Berkeley, Cal.: Wingbow Press, 1981.

——— . Message Bringer Woman. San Francisco: Taurean Horn Press, 1976.

268

Bibliography

——— . Morning Prayer. Brooklyn: Strawberry Press, 1977.

——— . Time Warps. San Francisco: Taurean Horn Press, 1976.

Sands, Kathleen Mullen. “Closing the Distance: Critic, Reader and the Works of James Welch,” Melus, Volume 14, Number 2 (Summer 1987): pp. 73–85. Scarberry-Garcia, Susan. Landmarks of Healing: A Study of “House Made of Dawn.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.

Schubnell, Matthias. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Schweninger, Lee. Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Seyersted, Per. Leslie Marmon Silko. Boise State University Western Writers Series, no. 45. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1980.

Sharma, Sanjeev. “From Loneliness to Wedding Ring: Bridging Distances Through Ethnicity in Winter in the Blood,” Indian Journal of American Studies, Volume 15, Number 1 (Winter 1985): pp. 25–31.

Shumaker, Conrad. Southwestern American Indian Literature: In the Classroom and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

——— . Ceremony. New York: Viking, 1977.

——— . The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko & Yames Wright, ed. Anne Wright. Saint Paul, Minn.: Greywolf Press, 1986. ——— . Laguna Woman. Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1974.

——— . “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,” On Literature, Nature, Landscape, and Natural History. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987, pp. 83–94.

——— . “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” and several other stories, in The Man to Send Rain Clouds, ed. Kenneth Rosen. New York: Random House, 1975, pp. 3–8. ——— . Storyteller. New York: Seaver, 1981.

Slowik, Mary. “Henry James, Meet Spider Woman: A Study of Narrative Form in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony,” North Dakota Review, Volume 57, Number 2 (Spring 1989): pp. 104–120.

Swann, Brian, and Arnold Krupat, eds. Recovering the Word. Essays on Native American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Tall Mountain, Mary. There Is No Word for Goodbye. Marvin, S.Dak.: Blue Cloud Press, 1982.

Tapahonso, Luci. Seasonal Woman. Santa Fe, N.M.: Tooth of Time Press, 1982.

Trafzer, Clifford, ed. Blue Dawn, Red Earth: New Native American Storytellers. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Bibliography

269

Trimble, Martha Scott. N. Scott Momaday. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1973.

Treuer, David. Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2006.

Velie, Alan R. Four American Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Vizenor, Gerald. Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

——— . “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies,” in I Tell You Now, eds. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, pp. 101–109. ——— . Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. St. Paul, Minn.: Bookslinger, 1978.

——— . Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

——— . Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

——— . Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Normal: Illinois State University; New York: Fiction Collective, 1987.

——— . Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ——— , ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

——— . The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

——— . Woodarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.

Volborth, Judith Mountain Leaf. Thunder Root: Traditional and Contemporary Native American Verse. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center Series, 1978. Walker, Cheryl. Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

Warner, Nicholas O. “Images of Drinking in ‘Woman Singing,’ Ceremony, and House Made of Dawn,” Melus, Volume 11, Number 4 (Winter 1984): pp. 15–30.

Warrior, Robert Allen. The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ——— . Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

270

Bibliography

Weaver, Craig S. Womack, Robert Warrior, Simon J. Ortiz, and Lisa Brooks. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Weaver, Jace. Other Worlds: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

Welburn, Ron. Roanoke and Wampun: Topics in Native American Heritage and Literatures. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

Welch, James. The Death of Jim Loney. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. ——— . Fools Crow. New York: Viking, 1986.

——— . The Indian Lawyer. New York: Norton, 1990.

——— . Riding the Earthboy 40: Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

——— . Winter in the Blood. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Whitson, Kathy J. Native American Literatures: An Encyclopedia of Works, Characters, Authors, and Themes. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1999.

Wiget, Andrew. “His Life in His Tail: The Native American Trickster and the Literature of Possibility,” in Redefining American Literary History, eds. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward Jr. New York: Modern Language Association, 1990, pp. 83–96.

Wild, Peter. James Welch. Boise State University Western Writers Series, no. 57. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1983.

——— . Review of Fools Crow, New York Times Book Review (November 2, 1986): p. 14. Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Wyss, Hilary E. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

Young Bear, Robert. Black Eagle Child. The Facepaint Narratives. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. ——— . The Invisible Musician. Duluth, Minn.: Holy Cow! Press, 1990.

——— . Winter of the Salamander. The Keeper of Importance. San Francisco: Harper, 1980.

Acknowledgments

E. Shelley Reid. “The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives,” MELUS, Volume 25, Numbers 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2000): pp. 65–86. Copyright © 2000 MELUS. Reprinted by permission of the author. Frederick E. Hoxie. “‘Thinking Like an Indian’: Exploring American Indian Views of American History,” Reviews in American History, Volume 29, Number 1 (March 2001): pp. 1–14. Copyright © 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author. Sheila Hassell Hughes. “Falls of Desire / Leaps of Faith: Religious Syncretism in Louise Erdrich’s and Joy Harjo’s ‘Mixed-Blood’ Poetry,” Religion and Literature, Volume 33, Number 2 (Summer 2001): pp. 59–83. Copyright © 2001 University of Notre Dame. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Jason W. Stevens. “Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology and the Ethnic Subjectivity of N. Scott Momaday,” American Literature, Volume 73, Number 3 (September 2001): pp. 599–631. Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Joseph L. Coulombe. “The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie’s Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” American Indian Quarterly, Volume 26, Number 1 (Winter 2002): pp. 94–115. Copyright © 2002 University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. 271

272

Acknowledgments

A. M. Regier. “Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing, Transatlantic Travel, and Modernist Arson in Gardens in the Dunes,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 51, Number 1 (Spring 2005): pp. 134–157. Copyright © 2005 Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author. Gary Totten. “Zitkala-Ša and the Problem of Regionalism: Nations, Narratives, and Critical Traditions,” American Indian Quarterly, Volume 29, Numbers 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2005): pp. 84–123. Copyright © 2005 University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Angelique V. Nixon. “Poem and Tale as Double Helix in Joy Harjo’s A Map to the Next World,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 18, Number 1 (March 2006): pp. 1–21. Copyright © 2006 Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. Reprinted by permission of the author. Elizabeth Gargano. “Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 31, Number 1 (April 2006): pp. 27–39. Copyright © 2006 Children’s Literature Association. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Caroline Wigginton. “Extending Root and Branch: Community Regeneration in the Petitions of Samson Occom,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 20, Number 4 (Winter 2008): pp. 24–55. Copyright © 2008 University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Joseph L. Coulombe. “Writing for Connection: Cross-Cultural Understanding in James Welch’s Historical Fiction,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 20, Number 3 (Fall 2008): pp. 1–28. Copyright © 2008 Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Index American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures, 208 American Revolution, 215 “American Scholar, The,” 148 “American West and the Burden of Belief, The,” 82 American Women Regionalists, 1850– 1910, 144 Amherst, Jeffrey, 35 Ammons, Elizabeth, 138 Ancient Child, The, 66, 68, 70, 74–75, 79, 82, 86–87 Andeg (character), 198 Anglesey, Zoë, 172 antislavery, 30 Apess, William, 29–31, 36 “Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor, The,” 97, 105, 108, 112 archeology, 129 Arizona, 105 Arnold, Ellen, 127 Arnold, Father (character), 110 “Arrowmaker, The,” 75 Arthur, King, 103 asceticism, 42–43, 47 Asia, 128 Asian Americans, 6, 26 assimilation, 156, 200 Atlanta Braves, 100 Atlanta Exposition, 153

Aaron, Hank, 99 Abby (character), 115 Abel (character), 15 Achebe, Chinua, 132 Adams, Dr. (character), 108 Adams, Henry, 8, 11, 13, 18, 132 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The, 101 Africa, 128 African Americans, 208 Against Amnesia, 130 Akaiyan (character), 235 Alabama, 28, 29, 30 Albertine (character), 10, 17 Aldama, Arturo, 117, 120 Alexie, Sherman, 93, 96, 100–101, 103, 105–107, 110–112 Alfred, Taiaiake, 160 Alger, Horatio, 235 Allen, Paula Gunn, 7, 44, 138, 172–173, 183 Almanac of the Dead, 128, 132 Amelia (character), 10 “America, Home of the Red Man,” 157 American Indian Ethnic Renewal, 103 American Indian Magazine, 149, 156 American Indian Movement, 34 American Indian Stories, 139, 146, 161 Americanize the First American: A Plan of Regeneration, 159 273

274 Atlantic, 140 Atlantic Monthly, 32, 148 Atole, Perfecto (character), 84 Austin, Mary, 149 autobiography, 7 Baker Massacre, 231 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 95, 101, 106 Baldridge, William, 46, 49 Baptism, 47, 50 Baptism of Desire, 42, 45, 47 Baptist Church, 56 “Barn Burning,” 132 basketball, 111 “Bear, The,” 71, 74 “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play The StarSpangled Banner At Woodstock,” 104 Bell, Deputy (character), 80 Bell, Franklin (character), 242 Bell, Michael Davitt, 139 Bellah, Robert N., 5, 20 Berger, Thomas, 26 Bernardin, Susan, 144 Betonie (character), 103 Beverley, John, 138 Bhabha, Homi, 117, 150 Bible, 46, 51–52, 221 Big Mom (character), 96 bildungsroman, 235 Billy the Kid, 66, 68, 70, 77, 79, 81, 84, 88 Birchbark House, The, 190–191, 193, 196, 199 Bird, Gloria, 93, 96 Black-Gown (character), 192, 200 Black Elk, 231 Black Hawk, 31 Black Hills, 159 Blaeser, Kimberly, 242 blues, 56

Index

Bone Game, 115 Boone, Daniel, 72 Boss Ribs (character), 238 Boston “tea party,” 100 Bourne, Lola, 83 Brady Bunch, 109 Break-Apart Girl (character), 192 Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Womens Regional Writing, 140 Brennan, Timothy, 148 Bretueil, Armand (character), 238, 242 Brodhead, Richard, 139 Bronwyn, Aunt (character), 128 Brooks, Joanna, 208–209 Brooks, Lisa, 208, 211, 220 “Brotherton Tribe to the New York State Assembly,” 216 “Brotherton Tribe to United States Congress,” 219, 223 Brown, Dee, 116, 122 Brumble, David, 9, 13 Buffalo Bill, 82, 84, 231 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 82 Builds-The-Fire, Thomas (character), 97, 105 Buntline, Ned (character), 68 Bureau of Ethnology, 118 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 33, 36, 105 burial practices, 44 Burns, Walter Noble, 68, 79 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 116, 123 Business of Fancydancing, The, 93, 97 Butterfly (character), 245 Cahan, Abraham, 140 California Needles, 125, 128, 132 Riverside, 125 San Francisco, 83 California Indian Herald, 152, 156

Index

“California Indians of Today, The,” 152 “Call, The,” 44 Cambodia, 57 Campbell, Donna, 142, 151 Canaanites, 46 Canada, 17, 33 cancer, 98 Canfield, George, 152 cannibalism, 145 captivity narrative, 126 Carden, Mary Paniccia, 151, 157– 158 Carlisle Indian School, 150, 157 Carraway, Nick (character), 83 Cary, Elisabeth Luther, 140 Catholicism, 42, 57, 60, 121, 141 celibacy, 43 Census Bureau, 152 Ceremony, 15, 103 Chacon, Anacita, 81 Charging Elk (character), 231–232, 234, 237–238, 240, 242, 244–245 Chemahuevi twins (characters), 126 Chesnutt, Charles, 140 chess, 194 child labor, 190 Christian Indians, 215 Christianity, 29–30, 32, 41, 46, 50–52, 57, 60, 120–121, 123, 133, 142, 204–206, 208, 212, 215, 219–220, 222–223, 237 Churchill, Ward, 34, 152 citizenship, 158 Civil Rights struggle, 108 Clare (character), 44–45, 47, 49 Clark, Joe (character), 242 Clark, Malcolm (character), 231 Clément, Catherine, 129 Clifford, James, 123, 205, 230, 240 colonialism, 36, 139, 207 “Colonies and Nations: A Short History of the United States,” 145

275

Colorado River, 124 Columbus, Christopher, 28, 111 Communion, 47 communitism, 206, 212–213, 220 Companion to the Regional Literatures of the America, A, 140 Confirmation, 47 Congress, 145 Connecticut, 203, 209, 215–216 Connecticut Assembly, 216–218 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 93, 138 Cooper, James Fenimore, 6, 69 Cooperstown, 99 Corn Mother, 55 “Coronation of Chief Powhatan Retold, The,” 159 Cox, James, 97, 149 Coyote Springs (ficitonal band), 97 Crazy Horse, 111 creativity, 94 criticism, 138, 154 Crow, Charles L., 140 Crumbling Idols, 148 “Cultural Work of Regionalism,” 140 Custer, George Armstrong, 231 Custer Died For Your Sins, 35, 99 Cutter, Martha, 137, 143 Cyphers, 212 “Dacotah Ode to Washington, A,” 161 Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, 133 Dakota Territory Yankton, 152 Davis, Cynthia, 138 Dawée, 140, 154 decolonization, 33 Delena (character), 125 Deloria, Phillip, 100 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 35, 48, 99, 108

276 “Democratic Vistas,” 148 Diana, Vanessa Holford, 146 Dirty Joe (character), 101 Disney, Walt, 7 Disrupting Savagism, 120 “Distances,” 104 “Doctrine of the Ghost Dance, The,” 120 Donahue, Phil, 6 Douglass, Frederick, 15 Dowd, Gregory Evans, 29 dreamcatcher, 20 “Drug Called Tradition, A,” 95–96, 111 drums, 108, 237 dualism, 54 Dungeons & Dragons, 97 Earlham College, 153 “Earlhamite, The,” 153 Eastman, Charles, 31, 36 Eaton, Edith Maude, 140 ecofeminist studies, 171 ecological studies, 171 Eden, 125, 221 “Editorial Comment,” 158 “Editors’ Study,” 148 Edward (character), 126, 130 Eiffel Tower, 234 Eli (character), 10 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 148 England, 125 Erdrich, Louise, 5–21, 41–60, 116, 130, 189–201 ethnicity, 65 “Eulogy on King Philip,” 30 Europe, 6, 126, 160 culture of, 29 Evans, Stephen, 95 Eve (biblical character), 221 “Every Little Hurricane,” 98 Extreme Unction, 47 Ezekiel (biblical character), 122

Index

Far, Sui Sin, 140 Farr, William, 236 Fast Horse (character), 235–236, 238, 240–241 Faulkner, William, 71, 132 Fawcett, Melissa Jayne, 211 Fawcett-Sayet, Melissa, 203, 209, 224 FBI, 34 Feather Woman (character), 239, 244 feminism, 42, 172 fetishism, 131 Fetterley, Judith, 144, 147, 154 Fine, Jason, 83 “First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue, The,” 111 Fisher, Dexter, 137, 159 Fisher, Philip, 161 Fishtail (character), 193 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 83 Fixico, Donald, 25, 37 Flathead reservation, 33 Fleur (character), 16 Florida, 30 Fools Crow (character), 234–235, 238–240, 244–245 Fools Crow, 229, 231, 233, 235, 238, 240–243 Foote, Stephanie, 138, 140, 148, 150 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 233 France, 6, 232, 240, 245 Marseille, 232 Paris, 83 Francisco (character), 72, 74 Franklin, Benjamin, 6, 8, 13, 18 From the Deep Woods to Civilization, 32 frontier myth, 68 Fuller, Margaret, 126 fundamentalism, 52, 133 “Fun House, The,” 103–105

Index

Game of Silence, The, 190–191, 195, 200 Gardens in the Dunes, 115–132 Garland, Hamlin, 148 Garrett, Pat, 68, 78, 81 Gazier, Vincent (character), 240 gender roles, 131 General Allotment Act, 152 Genesis, 222 genocide, 152, 156 George, Dick, 108 Georgia, 28, 30 Geronimo, 31 Ghost Dance, 115–133 Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, The, 115 Ghost Dancers, 232 ghosts, 194 Gill, Sam, 122 Gimbutas, Marija, 128 Gish, Robert, 233 Gizhe Manidoo, 200 God, 45, 58–59, 119, 240 Gordie (character), 10 Gospel of Matthew, 46 Grandma Fleet (character), 122, 130 Grass Dancer, 116, 129 Great Gatsby, The, 83 Great Plains, 118 Great Spirit, 161, 240 “Great Spirit, The,” 161 Grey (character), 68, 76, 79–81, 84, 88 Grinnell, George Bird, 9 Gusdorf, Georges, 8 Hafen, P. Jane, 137, 144 Hamlet, 78 Hammett, 6 Handsome Lake, 28, 30 Harjo, Joy, 18, 41–60, 171–184 Harpers, 141, 146

277

Hattie (character), 126, 128, 131– 132 Hawaii, 182 Heartsong of Charging Elk, The, 229, 231, 233, 237 “Heart to Heart Talk,” 156 Heath Anthology of American Literature, 132 Heavy Runner (character), 231 Heavy Shield Woman (character), 238, 240 “He Foretells Disaster in a Dream,” 78 Hemingway, Ernest, 6, 233 heroism, 159 Himmelsbach, Erik, 97 Hinojosa, Rolando, 125 Hippies, 104 history, 67, 130 Native American view of, 25–37 History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, The, 211 Holocaust, 35 Holt, Debra, 18 Holy Ghost, 55 Holy Orders, 47 Holy Spirit, 51 House Made of Dawn, 15, 67, 73, 86 Howells, William Dean, 148 Huhndorf, Shari M., 156 humor, 93–113, 230, 243 Identity Narratives, 5–21 “Imagining the Reservation,” 111 imperialism, 51 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 6 India Madras, 180 “Indian Gifts to Civilized Man,” 158–159 Indian Health Service, 99 Indian Killer, 111

278 “Indian Praying on the Hilltop, An,” 159 Indians, 82 “Indians’ Awakening, The,” 150 “Indian Teacher Among Indians, An,” 154 Indigo (character), 125–126, 130, 132 Indin’ Humor, 94 individualism, 5, 13, 191 Injun Joe (character), 101 Innes, Sherrie, 140 Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, 191 Israelites, 46 Italy, 126 Jackson, Andrew, 30 Jacob (biblical character), 52 Jacobs, Harriet, 6 Jahner, Elaine, 144, 146 James, Alice, 126 James I, 160 jazz, 56, 60 Jeffers, Robinson, 133 Jefferson, Thomas, 222 Jennings, Francis, 211 Jesus, 41, 237 “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation,” 111 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 141, 144, 146 Jimmy (character), 98–100, 105–107, 112 Johnny (character), 57 Johnson, William, 208, 210, 212– 213, 217 Johnson, Zachary, 214 Jordan, Robert (character), 233 Joseph, Chief, 31 Journey of Tai-Me, The, 67 Justice, Daniel Heath, 246 Kashpaw, Nector (character), 13

Index

Kashpaws (characters), 15 Kawbawgam, Charles, 197 Kent, Clark (character), 108 Keppell, F. P., 157 Kidder, Homer Huntingdon, 197 Kilcup, Karen, 155 Killing Custer, 111, 231, 236, 243 Kills-Close-to-the-Lake (character), 241 King (character), 10 King James Bible, 221 King Philip, 30 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 6 Kipp, Joe (character), 231, 241 “Kochinnenako in Academe,” 183 Kolodny, Annette, 68 Kopit, Arthur, 82, 87 Kroger, Mary (character), 43 Krupat, Arnold, 7, 9, 138 La Flesche, Francis, 32 Lake Superior, 191 Lamartines (characters), 15 Lamartine, Beverly, 12 Lamartine, Henry, 11 Lamartine, Lyman, 11 Larson, Sidner, 236 Leatherstocking (character), 69, 72, 80 “Letter to the Chiefs and Headmen of the Tribes,” 156–157, 159 Lila (character), 57 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 6 Lincoln, Kenneth, 15, 94, 96, 100, 103, 109 Lipsha (character), 10 Little Big Man, 26 “Little Girl and the Wiindigoo, The,” 199 “Logan’s Lament,” 222 Lone Ranger (character), 110 “Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The,” 109

Index

Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The, 94, 97, 102, 105, 108, 111 Long Teeth (character), 241 Love Medicine, 7, 10, 12–14, 16, 18, 116, 190 Lulu (character), 10–11 “Lulu’s Boys,” 12 lyricism, 130 Madeleine (character), 240 Magdalene, 43 Magnificat, the (character), 43 Makman, Lisa Hermien, 190 Malachi (biblical character), 212 manifest destiny, 153 “Map to the Next World, A,” 177 Map to the Next World, A, 171–184 “Margin at the Center, The,” 138 Marias River, 231, 243 Marias River Massacre, 231 Marie (character), 10 Maris, Roger, 99 Mary (biblical character), 240 Master Butchers’ Singing Club, The, 116 Matchimanito, 10 Maternity, 45 Mathias (character), 245 Matrimony, 47 Matthews, Billy (character), 81 Maxwell, Paulita, 81 McCaslin, Isaac (character), 72 McFarland, Ron, 107 McNickle, D’Arcy, 33, 124 “Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Love Medicine,” 190 Medicine Lodge, 236 Medicine Women, 203, 211 Meisenheimer, D. K. Jr., 141 Messiah (character), 123 Methodist Church, 29

279

Mihesuah, Devon Abbott, 230, 246 Mik-api (character), 235, 245 Mikobines (character), 200 Mikwam (character), 192–194, 198, 200 Mililani, 182 Miller, J. Hillis, 125 Mismeasure of Woman, The, 5 misogynism, 104 Misshepeshu, 16 Mississippi River, 211 Missouri Kansas City, 29 Mitchell, David, 8, 17 Mixedblood Messages, 94 modernism, 118 “Mohegan and Niantic Tribes to the Connecticut Assembly,” 216 Mohegan Leadership Council, 203, 205 “Mohegan Tribe on Rents,” 213 “Mohegan Tribe Standing Agreements,” 213 Momaday, N. Scott, 6, 15, 65–88, 246 Montana, 33, 236 Missoula, 233 “Montaukett Tribe to the State of New York,” 219 Montezuma, Carlos, 32 Mooney, James, 31, 115, 117, 119– 120, 145 Moors Indian Charity School, 209 “Morality of Indian Hating, The,” 67 Mormons, 123 Morrison, Toni, 129 Morrissey, June (character), 10, 14 Mount Rushmore, 111 multiculturalism, 190 Murray, David, 210, 223 Mvskoke, 183

280 My Darling Clementine, 68 “My Life as a Saint,” 44, 47, 49 Nagle, Joane, 103 Names, The, 67, 71, 74, 88 naming practices, 182 Nanabozho, 196–198 Nanapush (character), 10, 15–17 Napikwans, 233, 239, 242 Nathalie (character), 245 nationalism, 32, 139, 147, 151, 154, 156 Native American Renaissance, 246 Native American Renaissance, 96 Native Americans Algonquian, 215 Blackfeet, 229, 231–232, 235–236, 239 Blackfoot, 96 Brotherton, 215, 216, 220, 223 Cherokee, 30, 34, 56 Cheyenne, 26, 118 Chippewa, 9, 17 Cree, 33 Creek, 28, 51, 56, 176, 182 Crow, 241 Dakota, 155, 191 Delaware, 27 Hunkpapa, 31 Iroquois, 27, 29, 31, 211, 217 Jemez, 67 Keetowah, 34 Kiowa, 66, 69, 73, 76, 81, 85, 88 Lakota, 191, 232, 238, 244 Mahican, 215 Miami, 27 Mohegan, 203, 207, 211–212, 214–215, 219, 224 Montaukett, 215, 221 Muscogee, 51, 176 Muskogee, 56 Navajo, 67, 79, 128, 177

Index

Niantic, 215, 219 Objibwe, 43 Oglala, 229, 234, 238, 245 Ojibwa, 189–201 Ojibwe, 27 Omaha, 118 Oneida, 211, 215, 217 Ottawa, 27 Paiute, 31, 118, 121 Pawnee, 118 Pequot, 30 Pikuni, 235, 240, 245 Pokanoket, 30 Sand Lizards, 127 Santee, 31 Seneca, 28, 30–31 Shawnee, 27, 29, 30 Shinnecock, 215 Sioux, 31, 118, 122, 137, 142, 152, 158–159, 229, 234 Spokane, 93, 97, 108, 110 Stockbridge, 215 Teton, 152 Tonkawa, 145 Ute, 118 Wampanoag, 30 Winnebago, 118 Yankton, 32, 137 “Native American studies, 246 Native American Voice in Literature, The,” 75 nativism, 31, 35, 127 naturalism, 139 Nebraska, 118 Nelson, Dana D., 219 Neolin, 27, 31 Neolithic era, 128 Nevada, 118 Mason Valley, 119 Walker Lake, 124 New Deal, 33 New England, 29, 216 New Hampshire, 209 New Mexico Albuquerque, 125

Index

Laguna, 125 Santa Fe, 83 New Mexico Territory Lincoln, 80 New Testament, 212 New York, 29, 204 New York City, 33, 236 Night Swan (character), 103 Nokomis (character), 194, 196, 198, 200 nonviolence, 120 Nopatsis (character), 235 Norma (character), 98, 100, 105– 108, 112 Norris, Kathleen, 133 North American Church, 41 North Dakota, 116, 155 Occom, Samson, 203–224 Ohio, 27, 29 Ohiya, 141 Okker, Patricia, 141 Oklahoma, 52, 83 Old Ben (character, bear), 72, 74 Old Horn (character), 198 Old Indian Legends, 139, 154–155 Old Lodge Skins (character), 26 Old Tallow (character), 191 Old Testament, 212 Omakayas (character), 191–192, 194–196, 198–201 “Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore, The,” 102 oral narrative, 173, 189–201 oral tradition, 44, 115 “Original Memory,” 56, 60 “Our Last Cannibal Tribe,” 145 outlaw figure, 69 Owens, Louis, 12, 15, 19, 66, 93, 98, 100–102, 105, 115 Owl Child (character), 231, 241–242

281

pan-Indian resistance, 28 Paradise, 129 Parker, Arthur C., 31–32 Parker, Robert Dale, 244 Parker Reservation, 125 Pascal, Roy, 7 patriarchy, 142 Paul (biblical figure), 50 Pauline (character), 10, 16–17 Peelman, Achiel, 41, 47, 50–51 Pele, 182 Penance, 47 Pennsylvnia Pittsburgh, 27 Pequot War, 211 Peterson, Nancy J., 130 Peyer, Bernd, 207 peyote, 145 Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, 93 Pinch (character), 192 Pine Ridge Reservation, 118, 232 “Place in Fiction,” 139 Plains Indians, 47, 58 “Plunge of the Brave, The,” 13 Pocahontas, 161 poetry, 44, 47, 59, 71, 73, 78, 171 multicultural, 56 Poia (Scar Face), 235 Pontiacs Rebellion, 211 Potchikoo series, 43 Power, Susan, 116, 129 Powhatan, 159–161 Powwow Tavern, 101 prepatriarchalism, 128 Presbyterianism, 121 Protestantism, 42, 53 “Protocol,” 181 protofemaleness, 127 Pryse, Marjorie, 144, 147, 154 Puget Sound Shakers, 121

282 Rabbit (character), 56 racism, 32, 139, 142, 242 Rainwater, Catherine, 161, 190, 201 Rather, Dan, 6 Raven (character), 244 Raymond (character), 106 realism, 139 “Reconciliation: A Prayer,” 59 Red Cloud, 31 “Red Convertible, The,” 11 Red Cross, 158 “Red Man’s America, The,” 157 Red Paint (character), 234–235, 239, 244 Red Paint Woman (character), 231 Red Stick rebellion, 28 Regional Fictions, 138 regionalism, 137, 139–140, 142, 144, 147 Religious Syncretism, 41–61 René (character), 240, 242, 244–245 Reservation Blackfeet, 1882–1945, The, 236 Reservation Blues, 96, 102, 110, 112 Resisting Regionalism, 142 “Returning from the Enemy,” 171 Rides-at-the-door (character), 239, 244 Riel rebellion, 33 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 9, 11–13, 15 Royer, Diana, 140 Runner in the Sun, 124 Running Fisher (character), 241 Ruppert, James, 19, 190 Ruth, Babe, 99 sachems, 203, 207, 224 sacramentalism, 42 sacraments, 47 “Sacraments, The,” 47, 53 Sacred Tree, 211 Sacred Vow Woman, 236, 240, 244

Index

Sadie (character), 101 Saga of Billy the Kid, The, 68, 79 “Saint Clare,” 49 Saint Clare series, 43 Salt (character), 124 Sancerre, Alais, 83 Sand Hills, 244 Sand Lizard, 124, 132 Sand Lizards, 127 Sands, Kathleen, 18 Sante Fe New Mexican, 78 Satan, 221 Satire, 99 Scar Face, 235 “School Days,” 156, 159 Schorcht, Blanca, 233, 236 Schultz, Lydia, 8, 17, 19 Schultz, Paul, 49 Schwarzkopf, Norman, 11 “Sea of Good Intentions: Native American Books for Children,” 190 Seco-mo-muckon, 235 “Secretary’s Report in Brief, The,” 158 sectionalism, 147 Sees Twice (character), 240 Senate, 145, 158 Set (character), 84 Set-Angya (character), 82 Seven Sisters myth, 70, 74 sexism, 54 sexuality, 131, 243 Seydor, Paul, 68 Seymour (character), 93, 97 Shakers, 121 Shanley, Katherine, 161 Shanley, Kathryn, 142 Sherman Institute, 125 “Shinnecock Tribe to the State of New York,” 219 short stories, 94, 110 “Side by Side,” 153

Index

Silberman, Robert, 14 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 15, 103, 116, 120, 123, 125, 127, 129–131, 200, 246 Simon (character), 99–100 Sister Salt (character), 124–126, 128, 132 Sitting Bull, 31, 236 Skunk Bear (character), 239 slave narratives, 6 Slotkin, Richard, 68 Smith, Paul Chaat, 241 Smith, Sidonie, 155 Smithsonian Institute, 118 Smoke Signals, 105 Snelling, Captain (character), 241 So-at-sa-ki (Feather Woman), 235 Society of American Indians, 31, 156, 158 “Sociocultural Authority: The Mohegan Case,” 209 “Soft-Hearted Sioux, The,” 156 Sollors, Werner, 65, 140 “Songline of Dawn,” 176 Song of Solomon, 53, 55–56, 60 Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1974–1994, 173 Son of the Forest, A, 29 Sophia, 54 South Dakota, 32, 116, 155 Pierre, 157 Southwest, 116, 118, 126, 131 sovereignty, 139 Spain, 233 Spider, Grandmother (character), 84 Spider Woman’s Granddaughters, 173 St. Coincidence (character), 57 Stanford University, 71 Step and a Half (character), 116 stereotypes, 35, 190 sterilization, 105 Stetman, Locke (or Set, character), 70

283

“Stone-Boy,” 155 story cycle, 190 “Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid, The,” 78–79 Studies in American Indian Literatures, 246 Sturgis (character), 241 subaltern studies, 36 Sully, Alfred (character), 152, 231, 241 Sun Chief (character), 239 Sun Dance, 50, 57, 237, 244 Sun Dance ceremony, 236 Sundquist, Eric, 150 Surrounded, The, 33 symbolism, 47, 211–212 syncretism, 133 Tantaquidgeon, Gladys, 211 Tavris, Carol, 5, 13 Tayo (character), 15 Tecumseh, 28, 31 Tedlock, Dennis, 9 Tenskwatawa, 28, 30 Texas San Antonio, 145 Thames River, 216 That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community, 206 They Came Here First, 33 Third World, 34 “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” 105 Thomas (character), 95, 105 Thompson, Melissa Kay, 190 Tinker, George, 42, 49, 53–54, 58 Tonto (character), 102, 110 Torrez, Juliette, 104 Tosomah (character), 74 Toughest Indian in the World, The, 105 Tracks, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, 190

284 Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes, 199 Transcendentalism, 132 “Traveling,” 106 Treasury, 158 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 125 tree-burial, 44 “Trial Path, The,” 143, 145–146 Trickster, 56, 94, 96, 125, 244 Tsoai, 71 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 94 Twain, Mark, 6, 8, 101 Twilight (character), 192 Uncas, 221 University of Arizona, 68 University of Colorado, 34 University of Montana, 33 Vecsey, Christopher, 197, 199 Velie, Alan, 235 Velikova, Roumiana, 161 Victor (character), 95, 98, 101–102, 105, 111 Vietnam War, 57 Vizenor, Gerald, 86, 98, 205 Voice in the Margins, The, 138 Voyage Out, The, 131 Wakan Tanka, 240 Walker, Jack, 119 Walker Lake Reservation, 118 Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship, 71 War of 1812, 28 Washburn, Wilcomb, 25 Washington Puget Sound, 121 Seattle, 93 Spokane, 97 Wellpinit, 97 Washington, Booker T., 153 Washington, D.C., 32–33, 111, 118

Index

Washington, George, 145, 161 Washington Monument, 161 Washington Redskins, 102 Wayne, John, 6 Way to Rainy Mountain, The, 73 Weaver, Jace, 206 Welch, James, 111, 229–246 Welty, Eudora, 139 Wheelock, Eleazar, 209 “Whirlwind, The,” 180 White, Richard, 37 white supremacy, 123 Whitman, Walt, 148 “Why I Am a Pagan,” 141–142, 155, 159, 161 “Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman, The,” 152 Wiget, Andrew, 122 Wild West Show, 232 Wilkins, David, 152 Wilson, Angela Cavender, 230, 246 Wilson, Woodrow, 145, 160 Wind, Astrid, 210, 222 Winnemucca, Sarah, 31, 37 Winter in the Blood, 244 Winters, Yvor, 71 “Witnesses, Secret and Not,” 109– 110 Womack, Craig, 110, 138, 151, 172 Woman Warrior, The, 6 Woman Who Fell From the Sky, The, 56, 59 Wong, Hertha, 190, 193 Wong, Jade Snow, 6 Woodward, Pauline, 8 Woolf, Virginia, 131 World War I, 31–32 participation in, 157 World War II, 33 “Wound, The,” 81 Wounded Knee (massacre), 32, 36, 118, 232 Wovoka, 31, 117–119, 121

Index

Wyoming Devil’s Tower, 70 Wyss, 217, 223 Wyss, Hilary E., 215 Yankton Reservation, 153 Yellow Breast (character), 240 Yellow Kidney (character), 234, 241–242

285

Yellowstone, 73, 74 YMCA, 31 Zagarell, Sandra, 138 Zelda (character), 10, 17 “Zitkala-Ša: Evolution of a Writer,” 137 Zitkala-Ša, 32, 137–162