Intro
Native American literature's position relative to other national and transnational discourses:
▪ Postcolonialism - ometimes Native American literature has been grouped with postcolonial literatures. But this is a too simple conflation. Given some of the chronic conditions many Native peoples live under and the structural limitations placed upon Native development by white people, it is suggested by some critics that Native American in fact live under paracolonialism and that it is more appropriate to think of Native American literature as part of resistance literature.
▪ Postmodernism - some have suggested that the oral tradition strongly links to postmodernism. However, postmodernism, along with other intellectual developments, can place sophisticated and severe limitations upon the intellectual bases to Native American claims to literary and extra-literary voice and agency. Native voices must perform complex and shifting negotiations that are 'never simple or free of cost' (Louis Owens) in order to make a strategic and subversive impact upon literate Euro-America.
Autobiography:
▪ Many writers who have turned to autobiographical writings as one mode of grappling with vexed questions about the instability of identity and perhaps as a way to articulate or fashion a coherent Native subjectivity.
▪ N.Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Names: a Memoir (1976) - addresses how language, land, and history shape individuality. The first focuses on Kiowa history and culture, the second concentrates more stictly on Momaday himself.
▪ Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller (1981) - a collection of perviously published poems, short stories, myths, letters, essays, anecdotes, and photographs. She tells her mythical, community, and personal narratives. Sacred Water (1993), Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (1996).
▪ Gerald Vizenor's Landscapes (1990), Diane Glancy's Claiming Breath (1992), Janet Campbell Hale's Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter (1993), Simon Ortiz's After and Before the Lightning (1994), Anita Endrezze's Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon (2000), Linda Hogan's The Woman Who Watcher Over the World: a Native Memoir (2001).
▪ Louise Erdrich's The Blue Jay's Dance: a Birth Year (1995) - rather than focus on Native identity, she muses about herself as a woman writer. Binary oppositions: birth/death, individual/communal, body/spirit, wild/domesticated, etc. She struggles against depression as she interweaves history, recipes, and observations about the natural world. Images of home - mother's body, houses, nests, earth, all womb-like places of both contianment and emergence, highlightning the central paradox of the work.
Native American Renaissance: The publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, marks the change in Native writers literary production. Increased public interestin writings by Native Americans, Native writers themselves felt inspired and encouraged. Some causes:
▪ The counter-cultural perspective of the youth movement encouraged readers to explore the experiences of minority people and of those marginalized by mainstrean US society. Many of these readers sought expressions of community, spirit, exology, and egalitarianism that they could not find in mainstream society. The civil rights movement had turned many people's attention to questions of social justice and naturally Native American claims, having always formed a pole in the development of American self, came to the fore.
▪ The National Endowment for the Arts began a program of support for literary magazines, small presses, and individual artistic fellowship. Editors began to publish special issues of magazines dedicated to Native writers. Native writers wom grants to focus their energies on writing. This level of suppport encouraged and enlivened Native people, making it possible to create and publish literature at a level unseen before.
▪ A community of Native writers emerged, began to get published and to read each other's work. The development of this pan-tribal intellectual community created a network of writers who shared some similar values, responded to some similar history and had some similar things to say. They responded to each other, shared stories and manuscripts, visited and lectured with each othre. A Native and a non-Native audience developed when none had existed previously.
▪ Black Elf Speaks.
Other influentional books:
▪ Hyemeyohsts Storm's Seven Arrows (1972) - with colorful pictures, mandala-like shields, and a fantastic storyline. While some debated the authenticity of the author and the book, readers form the counter-culture added it to their booksehelves.
▪ Peter Blue Cloud - his first short story collection Back Then Tomorrow (1978). He took his inspiration from the Coyote tales common among many western tribes. In his retellings, he dictionalises and restructures the tales so they read like short fiction. He also takes the Native trickster and places him in contemporary situations to give a material presence to Native mythic reality.
▪ Joseph Bruchac's The Dreams of Jesse Brown (1978).
▪ Gerald Vizenor. A collection of short fiction Wordarrows: Indiand and Whites in the New Fur Trade (1978) and a novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (later reissued and retitled Bearheart: the Heirship Chronicles in 1990).
1978-89 - the next phase:
▪ As kicked off by the publication of The Remembered Earth: an Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature edited by Geary Hobson in 1979. this was the first thorough and representative collection of contemporary Native American poetry and fiction.
▪ Earth Power Coming (1983) - edited by Ortiz. One of the best collections of contemporary Native short fiction.
▪ 80s a decade of the growth and development of Native American fiction.
▪ Writers such as Simon Ortiz, James Welch, Louise Erdrich.
▪ Michael Dorris, emerging from his collaborative efforts with his wife, Erdrich, published his first novel in 1987. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water presents a mother (Native from Montana) and a daughter (the result of a brief marriage to a black man) who attempt to balance their needs for independence, love, and connection with their conflicting cultural, racial and personal values. Both try to reconnect with family, tradition, and community.
1990s - 2000s:
▪ 1990 - a banner year for Native American Literature.
▪ During the decade the best-known writers continued to expand and deepen their works, writers noted for work in other field turned to fiction, new writers emerged, and the body of published ficiton got richer and more xomplex as it dealt with changes in mainstream USA, reservation life, urban experience, and new ways of looking at old relationships.
▪ Ray Young Bear's Black Eagle Child: the Facepaint Narratives (1992) - follows the life of Edgar Bearchild as he grows in artistic ability and insight into the community around him, the Black Eagle Nation. Mixture of voices, writing techniques, and autobiographical information creates a stylistic and engaging exploration of contemporary Native experience and contemporary Native communities. Remnants of the First Earth (1996) - continues the fictionalised autobiographical writings of Bearchild as he comes of age in his rural Native community, but his time Young Bear ties it into a murder mystery.
▪ The scholar Louis Owens's Wolfsong (1991), The Sharpest Sight (1992), The Bone Game (1994), Nightland (1996), and Dark River (1999).
▪ Thomas King's Canadian First Nations inspired fiction. Medicine River (1990) - tells the story of a Native photographer who returns to the town of his youth only to find a lost commitment to family, friends, and community. Green Grass, Running Water (1993) - a novel that merges a narrator talking with Coyote, contemporary Blackfoot people, four old Natives that may be characters in Native and/or Western creation stories. Busting stereotypes about Natives and satirizing modern Western culture.
▪ Scholar Greg Sarris's debut Grand Avenue (1994) - comprised of a series of short stories that link the lives of Pomo Indians living in the town of Santa Rosa. Sarris weaves history, spiritual belief, and contemporary survival into the stories of an extended family living in a multicultural world. Watermelon Nights (1998).
▪ Number of changes after 1990: more urban characters, more middle-class or professional Native protagonists with stories set in the city as often as on the reservations. This might reflect the simple fact that more Native people live in cities than on reservation, or that most university education takes place in an urban setting. Or it may indicate a shift in perspectives as the dominant culture and Native cultures change.
▪ The writers in the 90s and in the 21th century seek to renegotiate the dualisms of modernism. They mediate the opposition between urban and rural, between Native and non-Native (white) readers. For them, oral tradition is not opposed to alienation, community is not always racially or culturally defined, and self-definitions are not exclusively constructeed of history and culture. The values of moernism are disrupted so that they may be renegoatiated. Irony is key to their literary productions.
Native American fiction as three distinct waves (Paula Gunn Allen, Song of the Turtle):
1) 1870-1970: reacted to the loss of land and culture with fiction that was predominately derived from characters, settings, and themes peopular in American and Europe.
2) 1974-early 1990s: writers defined by 'a sense of renewal and hope, reasserted often deeply angry, Native identity; and incorporation of ritual elements in both structure and content drawn from the ceremonial traditions'. These stories were concerned with cultural conflict that reflected an internal conflict. The tone was of an exotic and alien world where victimization was unrelenting. Allen felt the goal here was to create an 'authentic' Indian that would resonate with the expectations of the non-Native world while exploring a Native ancestry.
3) From late 1990s til now: she sees the writers as creating a more authentic pictue of modern Native American experience while recasting American and Native traditions or the 'transformation of alein elements into elements of ceremonial significance . . . Their focus shifts from history and traditional culture unalterably opposed to Anglo-European culture to urbanity and a more comprehensive, gloval perspective'.
▪ Also could be seen as a shift registering the influence of postmodernism. Much of the fiction published before the 90s was based on the modernist paradigm that set up as unalterable opposites the city and the reservation, the white man and the Indian, community and estrangment. Many protagonists are mired in alienation from the modern world, from community, and from self. Identity is fragmented and th eonly path to balance, harmony, and identity is a return to the reservation and to connect with ritual and traditoin. House Made of Dawn as a perfect expression of the native perception of modernism. The city was a wasteland of modern culture. People in the cities were alienated from their surroundings, their communities, their cultures. The reservations held conneciton to nature, spirit, culture, and community. The modernism protagonist must return to his roots and seek reingeration into the community and tradition to make himself whole and to dissolve alienation.
Momaday
N. Scott Momaday
By emphasizing the power of words as a means of survival and by insisting that contemporary human beings should maintain an ethical relationship to nature, Momaday accentuated two guiding principled for contemporary American Indian literature.
His writing provided emblematic representations of Native identitites that challenge the simplistic stereotypes of Native Americans as either frozen in the 19th century or completely severed from the indigenous cultures. For Native audiences, especially, his writings affirmed a vital and contemporary indigenous identity that is both multi-tribal (in Momaday's case, drawing predominantly from Kiowa, Navajo, and Jemez Pueblo traditions) and multicultural (drawing not only fron Native sources but also from Euro-American sources). His work reflects the mixed and often multiply hybrid experiences of Native Americans in the post-WWII era.
Features/themes/motifs of his writings:
▪ Memory enabling a persistent bond between indigenous ancestors and contemporary Native Americans.
▪ Multiple representations of specific characters, landscapes, stories, and concepts.
▪ An attention to issues of environmentalism and a consistent call for Americans to develop a contemporary 'land ethic' that is environmentally sound and spiritually meaningful
▪ His signature phrase - 'blood memroy' or 'memroy in the blood' - asserts the power of Native oral traditions to instill vital and distinctive cultural knowledge into contemporary individuals, whatever their official status.
▪ Autobiographical strans - his ongoing negotiations of his personal relationship to sacred geography. Memories of ancestors and their stories become vehicles for connecting Momaday to particular landscapes and their dense histories; in turn, landscapes 'cured in blood' become vehicles for connecting Momaday to ancestors and their authenticating stories.
House Made of Dawn (1968):
▪ Kiowa storytelling, Navajo ceremonialism, Jenez Pueblo landscapes and social/spiritual values, Modernist (especially Faulknerian) concepts of the novel, Emily Dickinson's and Yvor Winter's concept of the lyric, and rural and urban post WWII socio-economics. Navajo and Pueblo perspectives on life.
▪ Drawing from a variety of sources from Pueblo religious chants to historical documents, Momaday created a lyrical and compelling story of an alienated and disaffiliated young WWII veteran and his inability to bring himself back to health and harmony, his need to recover a viable identity within his community. As a story of a returned veteran, the novel's central themes are the problems of relocation, and of the articulation of a Native self in an urban landscape. ---> a novel about spiritual and psychological illness and the process of healing.
▪ Two concepts at work in Momaday's novel that are central to Native American cultural traditions: a communal understanding of human relationships to land and a high regard for the poewr of language. Landscape functions not only as setting, but also as an essential character; Abel's identity ultimately derives from the land itself.
▪ Momaday opens and closes the novel with formulaic words spoken at Jemez Pueblo to begin and end formal storytelling, placing his contemporary written narrative within the conventions of the oral tradition. Other markers of orality: the novel's circular structure and its development by parallelism and repetition of characers and scenes. Cyclical narrative structure: the narrative begins where it ends, with the ceremonial running at Jemez.
▪ Its organization as a ritual journey, however, is more subtle and requires specialized knowledge to fully elucidate. The recurrence of the number four (4 parts, four characters tell significant stories about bears and bear power from four cultural perspectives) as well as several significant pairs or sets of twins (abel and his brother Vidal in the flashbacks, Abel and Ben in contemporary LA, the snake-like albino at Jemez and the snake Martinez). Four is associated with the sacred in many Native traditions and indicates balance, completion, and harmony. Twinning is also an important Native concept, and many oral traditions figure their primary culture heroes as twins. The novel mimics Navajo chantways or healing ceremonials in its general movements from discord to harmony; the plot of the novel mimics both Kiowa and Navajo storytelling traditions in its patterning as aj ourney of re-emergence.
▪ The novel can be read as driven by an ensemble of central Native characters rather than by a single protagonist. Post-war Native experience: Ben, who displays attributes of a traditional healer, is in many ways still naive about the realities of living in the dominant society, while Tosamah, who is an intellectual, a peyota priest, is something of a trickster, is overly cynical.
▪ One running themes: the bond between grandparent and grandchild, emblematic of the increasingly tenous link between generations that are separated not only by time but also by dramatic demographic and sociocultural changes, including those specific changes brought by WWII and the era of Indian Relocation that followed in its immediate aftermath. Memories reveal not a statiac ingenous past but rather a long history of indigenous change and adaption. The bond between grandparent and grandchild thus recalls the power of change as well as the power of tradition and continuity. The theme of memory enabling a persistent bond between indigenous ancestors and contemporary Native Americans.
The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) - combined historical accounts with Kiowa oral narratives and personal observation. His blend of various sources, artwork, and lyrical perception, as he celebrateed the evolution and accomplishment of the Kiowa spirit. In the act of retelling the story in his own text, he aligns his voice with the voice of his ancestors, affirms his identity as Kiowa, and reaffirms the connection to sacred landscape entailed in that identity. In the representation of encoutner with sacred geography, Momaday incorporated the voice of the ancestor and the significant past that voice represents.
The Ancient Child (1989):
▪ a mixed-blood artist is separated from his Kiowa past, alienated from his family, tribal community, and ancestral land; he was adopoted into a white family as a child, didn't grow up with aa strong sense of his identity as a Kiowa or Native American. Lured back to Oklahoma by the power of myth and tradition. As he searches for his true identity, he is aided by a young Navajo girl with strong spirit power. Eventually he merges with the Bear Boy of Kiowa myths to find his most authentic self.
▪ It emphasises Momaday's attempts to synthesize the historic and the communal with the contemporary and the individual.
▪ The epilogue retells another 'traditional' Kiowa story to suggest in yet more detail the role the imagination plays in the relationship between sacred landscape and perosnal identity. Momaday's attempt to create a narrative perspeective that is transgenerational, both contemporary and ancient, what we might call the 'self-in-geneology- or more broadly the 'self-in-narrative'.
Ortiz, Vizenor
Simon Ortiz - born in 1941 and raised for the post part near his home pueblo of Acoma, New Mexico. A Native American poet, short-story writer, essayist, editor, social activist, and educator in all these roles, he is a teacher, an elder.
Even though Ortiz recounts many old-time stories and songs, and is a lyric poet of the natural world, he is at the same time a realistic chronicler of the recent history of ordinary people, Native and non-Native alike, living on and off reservations, and their struggles concerning labor, health, environment, class, race, and the politics that often pass them by.
Themes/motifs/features:
§ Native American contradictory conditions: 'The Way' and 'The Way Things Are' - strong taditional behaviors and beliefs coexist with poverty, substance abuse, violence, and other ills. Ortiz writes aabaout these with insight, balance, and compassion.
§ The primal connection between Native Americans and the land. Many places in his works are connected with more recent New Mexican history.
§ The land, language, and oral traditions, family.
Going for the Rain (1976):
§ Having grown up among working Acoma people, many of whom were displaced in the 50s by the relocation programs of the Eseinhower administration, Ortiz gave voice in his first book to the pain of separation many indigenous people suffered in cities. The joirney format allowed Ortiz to relate both the loneliness of urban Natives dislocated from their land and the long journey of his Acoma people over the millenia. For him, language itself is a journey from inside to outside oneself and back.
Howbah Indians (1978) - consists of four short stories.
§ The stories present the everyday lifeo f Native people struggling with common problems but they also present moments of humour and poignant juxtaposition of Native values and modern society.
Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980):
§ Commemorates the successful Pueblo Revolt of 1680, relating it to Pueblo resistance two centuries later.
§ He shows that violence to the land and to the people is one and the same.
Fightin': New and Collected Stories (1983) - a sophisticated view of cultural politics, yet in a way that respects any individual's potential to move past the problems that divide us and seek a common ground of humanity.
Gerald Vizenor - (b. 1934), Anishinaabeg. Works in multiple genres: poetry, short fiction, the novel, autobiography, journalism, essay, theory and criticism.
§ Griever, An American Monkey King in China (1987)
§ The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (1988)
§ The Heirs of Columbus (1991)
§ Dead Voices: Nautral Agonies in the Word Wars (1992)
§ Hotline Healers: an Almost Browne Novel (1997)
§ Chancers (2000)
§ Hiroshima Bugi (2003)
He devoted his career to upsetting the status quo, to deconstructing the term 'Indian', to re-defining the mixed-blood, and to liberating the contemporary Native people he identifies as postindian.
His haikus:
§ Though two thirds involve a natural scene, the scene is not rendered in a romantic or nostalgic manner,
§ Many of the poems turn oin an unusual juxtaposition, a moment of surprise, an unresolved tension, or an ironic trickster twist,
§ A kind of visual doubling or what Vizenor calls a moment of 'visual transformation'
§ Kinship with the traditional Anishinaabeg dream songs: both involve a restraint in language - are brief, tightly constructed, imagistic poems or song poems
Vizenor's stories grow out of the urban reservation of the Twin Cities. His characters battle racism, poverty, misconceptions, and self-delusions as they cut out a path for survival. The fabulist elements of the narratives marked Vizenor as a unique voice on the scene and his amazing and outlandish stories revealed humor and a keen wit.
Wordarrows: Indiand and Whites in the New Fur Trade (1978) - a collection of short fiction.
§ Introduces tribal tricksters, characters the like of which will become his trademark in fiction. Here these imaginative figures playfully expose verbal ironies as they try to maintain a balance in the complicated terrain of urban US.
§ Several pieces revolve around language and they spin a trickster twist as they refer to, summarize, comment on, and excerpt from Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. A trend of intertextuality.
Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978):
§ Begins a group of 8 sometimes overlapping novels involing trickster figures and employing a trickster dynamic in their narrative structures. He constructs complicated family and narrative relationships within and between the novels, sometimes repeating or recasting scenes and stories from one book in another. The referential texture of Vizenor's fiction involves continuous juxtaposition of supposedly separate realms of experience and knowledge. For example, characters and events from myth, tribal history, or his personal remembrance exist and act together on the page with contemporary situations and personages.
§ Set in a fantastic post-apocalypse America, it follows a group of tricksters and pilgrims on the way from the Great Lakes wodlands to Chaco Canyon. Myth and reality become fused in the novel, allowing Vizenor to take on the traditions of violence and linguistic manipulation that underpin modern US while creating 'mythic verism'.
§ The plot of Bearheart revolves around an oil shortage. Tribal myth is interwoven with contemporary politics to create a trickster allegory about liberation and survival.
§ The plot is episodic, secondary to the ideas, and the perspective is distinctly postmodern.
§ Through the novel, Vizenor undertakes the deconstruction of the stereotypical Native identity, the one invented and sustained in the romantic and tragic poses of classic American representations.
Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (1980): A collection of 21 narratives.
§ Key tactics to awaken a new perspective are his revamping of myth and his use of the trickster figure and trickster dynamic. He employs the earthdiver myth in the collection, but gives it a twist suggesting the new earthdivers are 'mixedbloods' and 'tribal tricksters' who 'dive into unknown urban places' in order to build a 'new urban turtle island'.
§ Vizenor continues to connect the contemporary to traditional myth or to interpret the contemporary by means of the mythic
§ He continues to develop his trickster theories, often using the trickster liberator as a metaphor for the tribal mixed-blood, and presenting the mixed-blood reality not as an impure or tragic identity, but as a position of power.
Women writers
Native writers of the mid to late 20th century were part of a resurgence of writing that some critics called the Native American literaray renaissance. Beginning with N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968), Native writers began to publish substantial amounts of fiction, poetry, and critical essays.
Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008), Laguna/Métis novelist, poet, theorist, and professor, a cousin of Silko.
} She collected and intepreted Native American mythology. She described herself as a 'multicultural event,' citing her Pueblo/Lebanese/Scottish-American ancestry.
} She writes from the perspective of a Laguna Pueblo woman from a culture in which the women are held in high respect. The descent is matrilinear - women owned the houses, and the primary deities are female. A major theme of her works is delineation and restoration of this woman-centered culture. Her work abounds with the mythic dimensions of women's relatinship to the sacred, as well as the sturggles of contemporary Native women, many of whom have lost the respect formerly accorded to them because of the incursion of Euro-American culture. She has also been a major champion to restore the place of queer Native Americans in the community.
} The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983) - besides loss of respect, her main character must sort out the various influences that having a mixed ancestry bring in order to reclaim a Native American woman's spiritual tradition. The growth and development of Ephanie from the sense of alienation she feels as a mixed-blood Hispanic/Native to an expanding sense of self and inentity through her female relatives ultimately to a larger connection with a spiritual realm and her own spirit power.
} As a major scholar, literary critic, and teacher of Native American literature: Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Desings (1983), The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in Amerian Indian Traditions (1986).
Joy Harjo (b. 1951), Muskogee/Cherokee, a poet, musician, and screenwriter.
} Assigns a central role to the power of the word - the mythic embodiment and memory of the Native American world - in shaping the remarkable quality of her writings as a living testimony: without evoking folkloristic elements, her work gives life to characters, stories, beliefs of Native identity; without pompous statements of intent, she gives force to a politicla vision; without censorious overtones she gives voice to the passions.
} Main themes: loss of identity, dissolutin of cultural roots, disintegration of the community and the familu unit, alcoholism, violence, the tenacious will to survive and breathe new life into one's group.
} She is known for the way her poetry creates characters who speak from the earth, reoving barriers in time and understanding between the sacred and the profane. Like Allen she creates strong women's voices in her poetry, fcountering the domiant culture idea of weak women.
} In her poetry, she writes of women's relationship to the land, their endurance, their centraility as the mothers of the future. Her works illustrates her belief in the power of language for change, healing, and continuance, showing the influence of the oral tradition with her often chant-like rhythms.
} She Had Some Horses (1983) - the image of a barrier - imprisons the ancestral lands inside reservations and cities, inside tradition and modernity, inside lost native language and language forcibly acquired. The most all-pervading theme - fear, and the dominant image - that of the horse.
} The Last Song (1975), What Moon Drove Me to This? (1979), In Mad Love and War (1990), Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writing of North America (1997) (with Gloria Bird), A Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), A Map to the Next World (2000).
Linda Hogan (b. 1947), Chickasaw, a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist.
} She works to restore the traditional Nativve American balance between male and female power that was disrupted by the coming of Euro-Americans. Her poetry celebrates te role of caretaking that women do from day to day, extending that caretaking to caring for the earth. Through her writings she seeks to draw upon wisdom from nature and from female powers of regeneration; her works is centered on the preservation of the environment. She tries to ground her writing in the lives of common people, while, at the same time, drawing upon the mythological from her Native heritage. Her work makes powerful statements about the individual's responsibility to others and to the earth.
} Mean Spirit (1993) - the theme is not only about the mistreatment of the Osage during the 1920s oil boom, but also about the destruction of the environment.
} Seeing Through the Sun (1985). Savings (1988) - many of the poems have to do with the lives of the urban Native. Set in Minneapolis, the poems speak of the brutality and racism of the city, but women into the poems is the hope of transcendence offered by the mythic. Eclipse (1983) - many of the poems are concerned with issues of war and destruction and their impact upon children. Book of Medicines (1993).
} Solar Storms (1995) - the progatonist's mother's failure to love, to care, which parallels the destruction of the environment; she has created a complex portrayal of the Native woman as hero, but this time the healing of the protagonist extends to concern for the community. The Whoman Who Watches Over the World (2001) - a memoir. A theme of a mother's failure to love.
Diane Glancy (b. 1941), Cherokee, author of numerous books of poetry, novels, essays, and plays.
} Her work often deals with identity issues. Her stories often have Native American characters who connect with the majesty of spirit expressed in nature and are changed. Her work is often a complicated mix of prose, poetry, drawings, photographs, and other media artifacts. Her poetic use of language is particularly valuable in capturing the consciousness of the different characters, who are in various stages of assimilation into Europ-American culture. She draws upon Native oral traditions and Euro-American written traditions, creating new forms of literature.
} Claiming Breath (1992) and The West Pole (1997) - autobiographical non-fction; explore issues of identity.
} Firesticks (1993) - a collection of short fiction. Much of her fiction explores the live sof contemporary urban Natives. These are not romanticised Natives, but well-cradted, complex characters.
} Pushing the Bear (1996) - in her quest to recover her heritage for herself and her Nation, she reconstructeed the journey along the Cherokee Trail of Tears. She includes newspaper articles of the day interspersed with the fictional stories of the participants, both soldiers and Cherokees.
Ella Deloria (1880-1971) - an anthropologist and linguist.
} Dakota Texts (1932). Waterlily (1988) - told from a woman's perspective, the novel vividly portrays the lives of a Dakota mother and duaghter in the late 19th century. Deloria incorporates her detailed knowledge of Dakota history, kinship customs, social rules, religion, and culture and depicts the impact on that society of growing enroachment from settles.
Anna Lee Walters:
} The Sun is Not Merciful (1985) - a collection of short fiction (8 short stories). It contains vivid portraits of people carced out of Walter's past in Oklahoma. In these stories of a struggle with the deligitimizing influece of contemporary life, Walters's characters draw on cultural values and the oral tradition to redefine and establish community.
} Ghost Singer (1988). Walters draws on her experience working at the Simthsonian Institution. The story follows the lvies of a number of characters who inuire into the mysterious deaths of museum officials working in the archives. Walters brins two medicine men together in the halls of the Simthsonian to deal with this supernatural threat, but their abilities are limited by museum attitudes toward grave artifacts and the spirit world. History and spiritual perception inform the novel as it examines some specific aspects of cross-cultural misunderstanding and the strength of the human spirit.
Janet Campell Hale:
} The Owl Song (1974) - tells the story of Billy White Hawk, a fourteen-year-old reservation Native who moved to the city and must find a way to come to grips with racism, cultural dissolution, and death.
} The Jailing of Cecilia Capture (1985) - the protagonist is a university law student who is arrested for drunk driving. Much of the nvoel is an interior monologue as Cecilia reviews her life and experience of alienation, death, alcoholism, and racism. She leaves the city to return to the reservation to find identity and community.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn: a poet, essayist, and editor of Wicaso Sa Review, then novelist.
} The Power of Horses and Other Stories (1990)
} From the River's Edge (1991) - her short story collection presents portraits of contemporary and traditional Sioux people surviving and responding to the cchallenges of the 20th century from WWI to Indian activism, but responding in a way that confirms Dakotah values. The protagonist is engaged for much of the novel with a trial over stolen cows but through the trial he realises the extent to which Dakotah values have been comromised.
Louise Erdrich: Born 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesotta. Parents of Ojibwe and German descent.
} Themes:
• The ties between people and geographical locations
• The importance of community among all living
• The complexities of individual and cultural identity
• The exigencies of marginalization, dispossession, and cultural survival
• Family and motherhood, storytelling, healing, environmental issues
• Historical consiousness - this revised awareness might enable us o see how dominant societies have constructeed their own versions of history that have passed for objective truth, Erdrich implies a more inclusive vision might help humanity to heal some historical wounds and to avoid repeating mistakes in the future.
} Love Medicine (1984):
• Her mixture of first person narration, oral tradition, and colorful images brought life to the imaginary reservation on the northern prairie, but has also proved to be a useful model for Native writers in the 90s.
• Examines the intricacies of the connections between a few families.
• Generational conflicts revolve around family history and individual obsessions.
• Religious expression merges ancestral and contemporary beliefs and the worlds of her novels are ripe with contemporary references and reminders of a confluence of traditional values and contemporary experience.
} The Beet Queen (1986):
• Set in a bordertown and follows the lives of Mary and Karl Adair.
• She chronicles the difficulties and despair of making lasting interpersonal connections and deep meaningful relationships. Hope and redemption seem always just out of the reach of the people in this novels.
} Tracks (1988):
• Functions as a prequel to Love Medicine exploring the early lives of some of its characters. Readers are immersed in the changed shaping the Chippewa reservation and society in the years from 1912-24: the old growth forests are being felled, white schools are making inroads as are Christian missionaries, and the federal bureaucracy is being felt as a palbable entity.
• The characters in the novel illustrate a variety of community responses to these changed, but the first-preson narration of the novel gives it a feel of a storytelling session.
• Nanapush teaches us to learn history first through our hearts, not our minds, in order to understand our individual responsibilities to past, present, and future. Such an educational process can begin only locally.
Welch
'James Welch: identity, circumstance, and chance'
His life and work have been informed by:
• His tribal heritage and experience
• His sense of belonging to a place (Montana and the West)
• His insistence on seeing (and depicting) Native American people first as human beings, that is, refusing to sentimentalize or romenticize them
• His preoccupation with creating a portraiture of Native American men's individual lives and struggles, a glimpse into their psyches and their souls.
Themes/motifs/features:
• Dilemmas arising from place-centered values and from the political as well as cultural designation of Native American identity
• Tensions between the pursuit of individual happiness and the hope of communal and/or familial well-being
• The contested motif of 'right to be Indian' pairs off with the idea that Natives are dealt a double injustice when sentimentality deprives them of being seen as whole, and therefore, as capable of erring as any other human being.
• Characters struggle to belong there and to belong with others
• All five protagonists are profoundly shpaed by the place of law: with Winter it is the foreign law the airplane man bring down on hiself, a mess the narrator almost gets caught up in; with Loney it is the law of an anachronistic West, where the cowboy rules and the Indian is destined to die in the end; with Fools Crow it is the law of treaties, as white enroachment pushes against the Pikuni people; with Sylvester it is two sides of the same law - the Indian and the non-Indian sides; and with Charging Elk, it is the law that punsihes hiim for acting according to the dictates of his own culture.
Written in the Blood (1974):
• narrator another alienated young man who find little meaning in his life and in the loves of those around him. He shuts out a painful past that includes the death of a brother and father and insulated himself from emotions and connections. A series of revelations about his family and thei rhistory helps rebuild bridges that were previously destroyed.
• As the novel ends, the narrator takes some tentative steps to regain his connections with family and tradition. He being to thaw the winter in his blood.
• First-person narration in which the philosophoical depth apparent in the narrator's musing is seldon borne out of his actions. The narration is situated in a continuous present, and yet the narrator doesn't account for the difference between his contemplative and experiential selves. While he may subtly articulate his estrangement and alienation from everyone and everything one moment, the next he gets pathetically and passionately caught up in the events around hi. He often refelects upon his life at great distance - either circumstantially or temporally - but even then offers little actual interpretation of its meaning. The result is that we cannot be sure what we ought to believe.
• The nameless narrator's ability to crystallize questions in his mind gets muddles by past, unresolved sorrows; he bumbles along, wondering what to do next. The novel ends before we have the slightest inkling of what he will do with what he now knows about himself, his family, or his heritage.
The Death of Jim Loney (1979):
• Mixed-blood protagonist struggles to find meaningful connections to family and community, but seems unable to overecome the social forces that marginalize him. Lonely is haunted by his past and mired in a meaninglessness that he has trouble understanding.
• The nvoel ends with Lonely's death at the hands of an Indian policeman, an event that Lonely himself orchestrated.
Fools Crow (1986): a historical novel.
• Welch tries to place the reader in the world of the Blackfeet before white settlers disrupted their culture in the 1870s. Welch focuses on the growth and development of one young man, Fools Crow, as he moved from a young man with little distinction to a leader of his group, one whose visions will help guide his band. Through the ues of Blackfeet words translated into English phrases and first-person visions, he tries to make his reader participate in a more Native perception of the invasion by the white world and the disruption it brought to the Native peoples.
Indian Lawyer:
• He presents a Native character who is flourishing and in the process of being groomed for unparalleled succes in his local community. His secure life is shaken by a run-in with a convict and he realises that there is something missing in this world of accomplishment. He has lost his connection with community and with his Nativeness, but what that should mean to the protagonist and how he should redefine himself is left open.
The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000):
• Charging Elk find himself in an absurd, upside-down world not unlike that faced by the narrator in Winter; his situation mirrors Jim Loney, who is trapped within his consciousness; and like Fools Crow, he is rooting in a world where the ways of being a man are clear, at least up until he leaves for Europe. He knows his world is changing unalterably.
Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna, b. 1948) - novelist, poet, essayist, photographer, cinematographer, a storyteller.
• Her work is a study in spirit transformation and cultural mediation (often reflected in the Laguna landscape that functions as setting and sometimes character; the bend of the river as a contact zone, where a female representing Laguna identity 'within' meets a male who represents some other cultural or spiritual identity 'out there'; a site of transformative contact events, appears as a place of comfort and regenerative energy)
• Her creative vision celebrates the transformative power of story and place, working together for life in a healing way.
Ceremony (1977), received wide acclaim.
▪ Ceremony explores the plight of the WWII Pueblo veterans; but unlike Momaday's novel, which has a rather ambiguous depressing ending, Ceremony speaks to the continuance of the Pueblo people. Laguna Pueblo critic and writer, Paula Gunn Allen, points to this difference in endings and perspectives on the future of Native peoples as one of the differences between male and female Native writers. Silko weaves the old stories that she heard as a child into the text, paralleling the modern story of her veterans. The novel culminates in a magnificent healing story inspired by and dedicated to Thought Woman, the primary Laguna deity.
▪ Tayo must come to understand the forces behind the destructive patterns of his experience. Using oral tradition and an unorthodox ceremony, the novel bind the fate of the reader with the fate of Tayo and humankind in a struggle that holds of mass destruction and brings renewal to the Pueblo traditions. For Silko, his integration into society, culture, and myth represent revitalization of tradition by those marginalized by both traditional Native societies and mainstream USAmerican society.
▪ Theme of departure and recovery. Healing and the healing power of the stories and the land. The disease that has infected people is the old bane known at Laguna as Ck'o'yo medicine, which takes several new forms: WWII and its deadful fallout, including such new art forms as nuclear fission and the atomic weapons capable of destroying all life; the polarization of the world's populations along both ideological and generational lines, including the emergence of a bitter animosity between 'full-bloods' and 'halfbreeds' that threatens to destroy 20th century Native communities; and the pervasive feeling of separation and isolation, of anomie or existential alienation, that came increasingly to characterize the American experience in the 20th century. What Tayo must come to understan is that these are indeed not separate diseases but rather symptoms of a single disease made insidious precisely by its ability to disguise itself as separate diseases. Tayo's illness within the context of the timeless struggle between life and the forces of witchery that seek to consume life.
▪ The narrative persona aligns herself with Keresan oral tradition by claiming to be one of a very long line of storytellers whose role is to preserve and pass along the story set in motion by 'Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought Woman'; this story is the lifeo f the people, life for the people. Throughout the novel, passages from the old stories serve to orient a reader already familiar with these stories in the otherwise sometimes chronologically and geographically confusing tale. These fragments of story, or embedded texts, remind such an audience that the long story of the people contains precedents for everything that happens in the life of any one of the people. Most of the hama-ha stories have clear precedents in the published ethnographic records of Laguna oral tradition, btu Silko also weaves in material derived from Navajo story and ceremony.
Laguna Woman (1974) - short stories and poetry. The title story demonstrates the process of storytelling and being a Native American storytelling.
Storyteller (1981) - a collection of stories, poems, and photographs.
▪ A storytelling performance in which the storyteller is depending on visual imagery to do most of the cultural work of an oral tradition. The text is a virtual encoclypoedia of storytelling styles and story materials adapted to textual form, all the kinds of and ways of traditional story and storytelling.
▪ She places her poems and fiction in the context of the Laguna oral tradition especially as it becomes intertwined with the experiences of her family and ancestors. Each item resonated with those that precede it and Silko builds an intimate picture of connectedness and community. The storytelling voice and vision are firmly rooted in the land and ladscape of Laguna.
▪ Her use of myth and oral traditoin was highlighted and the volume included a number of her popular short stories, such as 'Storyteller' and 'Yellow Woman'.
Almanac of the Dead (1991):
▪ The concept that printed words themselves are visual images, and thus close relatives of other visual art forms.
▪ a graphic and disturbing tale of drug dealers, military tyrants, self-serving land developers, and corrupt Native Americans. The controversial novel documents 500 years of European abuse and oppression of Nataive Americans and land. A massive novel that tries to pull together the history of the domination of the Americas, the evolution of political revolutions, the mythic legacy of the two continents, and forge a unity from diverse Native traditions.
▪ Motif od departure and return - contact with attractive but dangerous non-Laguna forces, dearture from Laguna, and eventual return to Laguna with the acuired knowledge of how to live with those forces.
▪ As the novel progresses, a set of notebooks presaging the apocalyptic cmovement of people and traditions is revealed and they become central to the growing Native revolt against the dominant culture's theft of land and culture.
▪ The novel is a prophecy of the reassertion of Native values as Native people take back the land.
Garden of the Dunes (1999): Silko's foray into the historical novel.
▪ Elegant novel imitates the style of Victorian historicla romance in the diction and narrative distance that characterize the telling of the story; both polot and style work to give voice to Silko's persistently Laguna storytelling persona.
▪ Silko explores threads of European earth-based and Native American women's spirituality among other themes. As in her other works, these novels emphasize traditional story as a model for contemporary behavior and the continuance of Native American peoples. Silko explores late 19th century/early 20th century botanical and financial entrepreneurship, religious discussions of paganism and early Chrstianity, and Women's positions in the Native and white worlds.
▪ Myth is again central to Silko's work, but much of her interest seems to lie in mythic commonalities between cultures, and the dominant culture's lack of understanding of that reality.
Alexie
'Sherman Alexie: irony, intimacy, and agency'
(b. 1966) Comedian, poetry bout heavyweight, experimental writer, filmmaker, and social pundit. Genres: poetry, short fiction, novel, non-fiction, and film.
Themes/motifs/features:
w Reaffirming Native lives and Native nationhood, although his direct comedic style and ironic attitude set him apart from the earnest lyricism of the now vanonized elder Native writers, and from many of his peers.
w Such postmodern questions as psychological and social border crossings, internalized oppression, violence, addiction, the absent father, and racial tensions, particularly white guilt.
w Topics of pain and humor, hunger and survival, love and anger, broken treaties, manifest destinies.
w Radical affirmation of diversity.
w Emphasis on political and legal status of tribal sovereignty, rather than the cultural dynamics of tribal life.
w His fiction is characterised by a decidedly anti-romantic view of Native life and of the everyday struggles to survive. His reservation dwellers do not contemplate myth or pronounce wisdom about nature.
A pattern of intimacy and irony:
w A recurring pattern links agency or limited power to dramatic intimacy, ever saturated in irony. By imbuing often sexual bodies with a vitalizing sense of humour and the friction of irony, Alexie affirms a sense of subjective will and humanity in his characters that helps set them free in their colonial context.
w This spiraling pattern of intimacy, irony, and agency can be sexual or political, personal or public in his works. Language plus the body equals purpose, i.e., when the body communicated, when it achieves expression across the intimate borders of bodily difference, then it spirals out of the vortex of alienation.
w As he maps the inimate psychological and social violence of Indian-white relations, he not only humanizes that history of grief, but he minimizes it by showing how humour can survive even death.
w Poetry = anger x imagination. Storytelling - for his characters resonates with creative expression as power, fulfillment of will, proficiency in surviving, an assertion of agency.
Reservation Blues (1995):
w Follows the lives of some of the characters form his other short stories as they form an ill-fated rock band. Obsession and self-destruction haunt the members as the reader tries to decide if their lack of success is failure or redemtpion.
w Alienation (Native identities wandering in a sea of loss, looking ofr islands of human connection) is balanced by narratives of often conflicetd relations that individuals do indeed have with community: a group weight that is no less communal for being maddening, sometimes mythic and sometimes sinister, always perplexing.
Indian Killer (1996):
w A murder mystery where Alexie turns a self-conscious eye on the genre as well as on the popular images of Native Americans and the complexities of cross-cultural interaction.
w Alexie makes that link explicit between repressed history and the repressed psyche of American violence by setting grotesque violence as an outcome of colonial history. By linking murder to imagery of Indian blood rituals, Indian Killer plays in nuances ways against white guilt, trapping the reader into assuming the worst about the Indian protagonist in a mystery murder plot. He keeps the ending ambiguous, reflecting innuendos in the novel's title, but by that ambiguity sets up the Anglo reader to scapegoat the Indian and thus experience white guilt yet again.
