Reading Native American Literature

Joseph Coulombe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136839580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Native American literature explores divides between public and private cultures, ethnicities and experience. In this volume, Joseph Coulombe argues that Native American writers use diverse narrative strategies to engage with readers and are 'writing for connection' with both Native and non-Native audiences.

Beginning with a historical overview of Native American literature, this book presents focused readings of key texts including:

• N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn

• Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

• Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart

• James Welch's Fool's Crow

• Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

• Linda Hogan's Power.

Suggesting new ways towards a sensitive engagement with tribal cultures, this book provides not only a comprehensive introduction to Native American literature but also a critical framework through which it may be read.

1

FOLLOWING THE TRACKS

HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF NATIVE WRITING

Native American literature did not appear suddenly from a void with the publication of Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. Its 1969 Pulitzer Prize is simply the historical moment when white America – and others – began to acknowledge the great value of Native writing. For centuries, indigenous Americans have written to express themselves and defend their lands, cultures, and sovereignty. From Samson Occom in the seventeenth century to D’Arcy McNickle in the twentieth century, Native writers have voiced their opinions, shared their stories, and advocated for their rights with force and intelligence. Their sermons, essays, autobiographies, histories, poems, plays, and novels offer an extensive foreground and a vital context for the prose and poetry currently earning acclaim.

Written Native American literary history represents an impressive achievement of wide-ranging styles, opinions, and goals, particularly considering the fact that many Native writers were compelled to use English rather than their own languages. Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird emphasize the success and creativity of Native writers – as well as the particular challenges of writing in English – in the title of their anthology, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language (1997). Over the centuries, Native writers have adopted and adapted a language that white Americans more often used as a tool of betrayal and dispossession. Treaties, agreements, and laws enacted by Euro-American officials regularly offered empty promises, and non-Native writers consistently distorted indigenous peoples in poetry, periodicals, and fiction.

As a result, the impact of a well-phrased argument was often lost in the barrage of meaningless verbiage. Yet despite white America’s desire to obscure these voices, Indian writers succeeded in accommodating the language to their own needs. In Tracks (1988), Louise Erdrich comments upon the obscure legalese used to seize tribal land and its other effects. One of her narrators, Nanapush, complains that the Anishinaabe have become “a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match” (225). Nanapush is a story-teller profoundly connected to tribal oral tradition, and he distrusts the written documents and their promises. His apprehension is matched by Margaret, who avoids touching printed words because she “didn’t want the tracks rubbing off on her skin” (47). In the end, however, Nanapush follows the “tracks” of his granddaughter Lulu through a forest of paperwork to free her from a prison-like boarding school. His success mirrors Erdrich’s own achievement – as well as that of other Native writers – who create and follow “tracks” to the past to help liberate succeeding generations.

Native American publications provide a pathway leading readers to a more complete understanding of Native history, ideas, and rights. Indian writers help readers look backward to interpret not only the past, but also the present. For Natives, the use of the enemy’s language is a powerful weapon in the fight for self-determination and sovereignty.

Invasion and Loss

In 1492, the Americas contained approximately fifty million people (Taylor, American 40). In the area currently occupied by the United States and Canada, population estimates at first contact range to 18 million (Green, British Museum Encyclopedia 122). Thus, overstating the diversity of indigenous cultures and traditions is practically impossible. Today, in North America alone, nearly six hundred indigenous nations sustain a range of social structures and belief systems.¹ Karen Kilcup describes North America as “peopled by diverse groups of tribal cultures dazzling in the variety of their language, religion, social and political organization, and means of livelihood” (“Introduction”2). To generalize about American Indians is, almost necessarily, to be wrong.

Nonetheless, all Indigenous peoples and cultures were threatened – either directly or indirectly – by the arrival of Europeans. Diseases decimated indigenous populations. Many tribes endured multiple waves of illnesses, which made them more vulnerable to colonization. From 1617 to 1620, for instance, a pandemic – likely brought from Europe by fishing vessels stopping for water and supplies – killed 90 to 96 percent of the Native population in the New England region (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me 80). The psychological and cultural trauma – multiplied generationally for all tribes – is immeasurable.

Communities weakened by disease were often further destroyed by warfare and slavery. An often overlooked fact of American history is the enslavement not only of Africans and African Americans, but also of Native Americans. A 1708 South Carolina census identifies 1,400 Native slaves, and a 1730 census from Rhode Island lists 223 Indian slaves (ibid. 106). American Indians captured during war by Euro-Americans were often sold into slavery in the West Indies. Warfare weakened and destroyed many Native communities and cultures. Battles over land occurred regularly, and some escalated to the level of full-scale war. Early wars include the Pequot War of 1636–37, King Philip’s War in 1675 (involving the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Podunk, and Nipmuck), and the French and Indian War (part of the global Seven Years War), which ran from 1754 to 1763. In each case, tribal populations were ravaged, and their lands were taken by American colonists.

Other land grabs were orchestrated with no consideration for tribal sovereignty or peoples. After the American Revolution, the United States negotiated with other nations – not tribal governments – for tribal lands. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, for instance, removed France as a colonial competitor for Native lands. No indigenous officials were consulted or paid, despite obvious tribal ownership and occupation of the territory. The purchase is often heralded as a world-class bargain, but the U.S. paid France for Indian land. Likewise, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo claimed extensive tribal lands from Mexico, including California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Montana, and New Mexico. Again, indigenous peoples were not consulted or paid during these negotiations for their lands.

These political maneuvers, cultural threats, and apocalyptic events contribute to the historical context for understanding Native writing in English. Indigenous intellectuals often wrote with a mixture of anger, frustration, and sorrow at white treachery and their own dispossession, while their marginalized position in American society compelled them to strike a moderate middle-ground to define themselves and defend their rights.

Adapting to Change, Writing for Change

Facing relentless physical and cultural assaults, many Native people incorporated elements of Christianity into their belief systems, or they converted outright. In the eighteenth century, an increase in missionary efforts by European colonists – particularly during the Christian revivalism of the 1730s and 1740s – sought to Westernize indigenous Americans. Mission schools and Indian “Praying Towns” were established by white reformers on tribal lands, and many Natives took the opportunity to learn to read and write in English.² Hundreds of Natives attended programs at Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, and the College of William and Mary during the 1660–70s (Peyer, “Introduction” 5).

Samson Occom – the first published Native American writer – converted to Christianity during this period. His Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772) went through nineteen editions. At the time, it was valued primarily as a temperance tract denouncing the “sin of drunkenness” (Occom, Collected 192). However, Occom implicitly condemns the white culture that introduced alcohol to Native people, and he subtly equates Moses’ execution with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In this way, he suggests the betrayal at the heart of white/Indian relations. Occom himself was betrayed personally by his employer, Eleazor Wheelock, who broke his promise to care for Occom’s family while Occom lived in England for two years raising funds for Wheelock’s Indian charity project. Moreover, the funds were used to establish Dartmouth University primarily for white people, rather than to educate indigenous Americans, as planned.

Although several Natives write within this early Christian tradition, including Joseph Johnson (Occom’s son-in-law) and Hendrick Aupaumut, William Apess is the best known. An ordained Methodist minister, he directly addressed white Christian readers to decry the hypocrisy of their racism. Apess used biblical references to authorize his opinions and his anger, while defending the dignity and rights of Native people. His autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), was his first publication, and an expanded edition appeared within two years. Building upon his success, he published The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe (1833), which extended the range and form of the spiritual autobiography to showcase indigenous Christians facing racism and removal. Its final chapter, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” is a forceful vindication of Native morality and intellectualism as well as a finely honed attack on white-generated stereotypes and prejudice.

Apess was writing at a particularly bleak period of Native American history. By the 1830s, a federal policy of separation and removal had replaced a policy of assimilation-via-Christianity. After U.S. independence from Britain, federal policy increasingly sought to isolate Indians by restricting them to ever-shrinking reservations or removing them entirely from traditional tribal lands. Written treaties became a central feature of this policy, which lasted for nearly a century. Between 1778 and 1870, nearly 400 treaties were ratified.³ Many were thinly veiled efforts to legitimize land theft using duplicitous legalese and straw-man signatures. Many more were broken. Charles Eastman wrote: “Never was more ruthless fraud and graft practiced upon a defenseless people than upon these poor natives by the politicians! Never were there more worthless ‘scraps of paper’ anywhere in the world than many of the Indian treaties and Government documents” (Deep Woods to Civilization 99).

The history of broken treaties is not only another unfortunate testament to U.S. hypocrisy, greed, and racism, but it is also an essential backdrop and context for reading Native American literature. Even when not mentioned explicitly, the history is never far below the surface.

Trail of Broken Treaties

The first treaty was signed with the Delaware (Lenape) in 1778 during the American Revolution. Although the Delaware agreed to help the new nation against the British in exchange for statehood, the treaty was not upheld by the U.S. The Delaware signed 18 subsequent treaties that essentially took their land and relocated tribal members from the eastern seaboard to Canada and Oklahoma (Nabokov, Native American Testimony 119). Another representative example of such malfeasance occurred between 1800 and 1812, during which 15 treaties took present-day Illinois, Indiana, and parts of Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin from several different tribes.

After the War of 1812, the federal government expanded its policy of removal and aggressively pressured eastern tribes to relocate west of the Mississippi River to “Indian Territory” (which became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, further disenfranchising many Indians). Some tribes had allied themselves with Britain during the war – such as the Creeks and Shawnee – and U.S. officials sought to punish them. The Red Stick War (1813–14) against the Muskogee Creek left 80 percent of the tribe dead, and the resulting treaty took 14 million acres of land (Green, British Museum Encyclopedia 131).

Indian lands were valuable, and, significantly, some tribes were successful competitors within the American economy. The Cherokee, who, in fact, had allied with the U.S. against Britain, were targeted for removal along with the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles – the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes.” They lobbied hard to preserve their remaining lands in present-day Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, an effort aided by the Cherokee syllabary completed by Sequoyah in 1821. To publicize tribal concerns, Elias Boudinot began publishing The Cherokee Phoenix in 1828 in both English and Cherokee.⁴

Boudinot toured the eastern states in 1826 raising funds and awareness. His published speech, “An Address to the Whites,” specifically targeted white readers on behalf of Cherokee people, lands, and rights. It begins by highlighting the similarity between whites and Natives: “What is an Indian? Is he not formed of the same materials with yourself?” (69). Asserting that whites “differ from them [the Cherokee] chiefly in name” (72), he claims “the common liberties of America” (77–78) for all Natives. Boudinot details their accomplishments – including the syllabary, conversion to Christianity, and success as ranchers and farmers – in an attempt to normalize Native people to white readers. Amongst other evidence, he explains that Cherokee in Georgia own “22,000 cattle; 7,600 horses; 46,000 swine; 2,500 sheep; 762 looms; 2,488 spinning wheels; 172 wagons; 29 ploughs; 10 saw-mills; 31 grist-mills; 62 Blacksmith shops; 8 cotton machines; 18 schools; 18 ferries” (72).⁵ Boudinot concludes his address by warning of Cherokee extinction, a very literal threat considering the treatment of indigenous peoples over the previous three hundred years.

Despite efforts, the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830 with President Andrew Jackson’s full support. The Cherokee fought it all the way to the Supreme Court but were left with few good options. Boudinot was one of approximately 100 Cherokee who signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, which ceded remaining tribal lands. Fifteen thousand Cherokee signed an official protest circulated by tribal council – but to no avail. What followed is known as the Trail of Tears. By 1838, nearly 17,000 Natives were forcibly marched – often at gunpoint – from their tribal lands to Oklahoma. Approximately 4,000 died. Boudinot was killed in 1839 by tribal members for his role in the removal, as were other leaders who signed the treaty. In her historical novel, Pushing the Bear (1996), Diane Glancy recounts the personal and cultural devastation caused by removal.

While eastern tribes were being forced west of the Mississippi River, western tribes were also facing ongoing encroachment and assault. Spanish invaders had entered the southwest as early as 1540 when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an army through present-day Arizona and New Mexico (ultimately reaching Kansas). Euro-Americans continued making imperialist incursions into tribal lands, establishing missionaries and trading posts throughout the west. In Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (aka Thocmetony) offers a personal and tribal history of the years between 1844 and 1883, which includes the 1878 Bannock War. She recounts her childhood fear and helplessness as whites brought disease and took land in Nevada, California, Idaho, and Oregon. She documents massacres, rapes, and other brutalities perpetrated upon the Piaute and other tribes. As a translator, Winnemucca was in a good position to witness and publicize events taking place in the west. As in the hundreds of lectures Winnemucca gave throughout the United States, Life Among the Piutes sharply criticizes the reservation agents who profited personally without helping Natives or upholding treaty rights, and she was an outspoken and controversial advocate of land rights and reform.

John Rollin Ridge (aka Yellow Bird) also wrote about land rights and abuses in the far west, but he used popular fiction as his vehicle. In 1854, Ridge published the first novel by a Native American, Life and Legend of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, which dramatizes the struggle of a Mexican man resisting American colonialism in the 1850s after the Mexican War. Forced off his land and treated like the “conquered subjects of the United States, having no rights which could stand before a haughtier and superior race” (9), Joaquín becomes an outlaw and “live[s] henceforth for revenge” (12). After much violence, banditry, and bravado, interspersed occasionally with episodes of sentiment and romance, Joaquín is killed, but the legend of the outlaw lives forever, not least because of Ridge’s efforts.

Joaquín serves as a proxy for Native America: both had their land stolen, and both fought to assert their dignity. Ridge, however, failed to express much pan-Indian solidarity in Life, and his novel treats the Tejon Nation of California in condescending terms. His family history is the centerpiece of a posthumous work, Poems, by a Cherokee Indian, with an Account of the Assassination of His Father, John Ridge (1868), which may be the first book of poetry published by a Native writer (Ruoff, “Native American Writings” 149). The author’s father and grandfather, John Ridge and Major Ridge, were killed – like Elias Boudinot – because they signed the treaty that precipitated Cherokee removal and the Trail of Tears.

While the Trail of Tears is perhaps the most infamous removal, many indigenous people experienced grief and trauma from military takeovers and outright massacres. The atrocities of nineteenth-century U.S. history are well-documented (although not always well-publicized), and they inform Native thought and writing in the past as well as the present. In the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, for instance, over 150 Arapaho and Cheyenne – primarily women, children, and elderly – were killed and mutilated by soldiers in southeastern Colorado, despite the fact that their leader, Black Kettle, served as a peace chief for the Cheyenne (Greene, Washita 21). Likewise, in 1870, a peaceful band of Blackfeet in Montana was attacked by federal troops. Although its leaders had signed a peace treaty, over 170 women, children, and infirm were massacred. The men were on a hunting expedition, and not a single federal soldier was killed. James Welch recounts the event – known as the Marias Massacre – in his novel Fools Crow (discussed in Chapter 5).

Such atrocities represent important historical touchstones, and many are reconstructed in fiction and poetry by Native writers. Luci Tapahonso, for instance, writes of Navajo removal – also called the “Long Walk” – an event central to Diné tribal history. Tapahonso prefaces her poem, “In 1864,” with a factual account of the event, in which eight thousand Navajo were marched at gunpoint three hundred miles from their land in New Mexico to a military enclosure at Fort Sumner: “They were held for four years until the U.S. government dec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction: Native American literary outreach and the Non-native reader
• 1. Following the tracks: history and context of Native writing
• 2. Nothing but words: from confrontation to connection in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn
• 3. Revitalizing the original clan: participant readers in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
• 4. Individualism vs. separation: imagining the self to foster unity via Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart
• 5. Writing for connection: cross-cultural understanding in James Welch’s historical fiction
• 6. The approximate size of his favorite humor: Sherman Alexie’s comic connections and disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
• 7. Stitching the gap: believing vs. knowing in Linda Hogan’s Power
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index