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SAIL
Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2 Volume
14, Number 4 Winter
2002
CONTENTS
Spirit Armies and Ghost Dancers: The Dialogic Nature of
American Indian
Resistance by Edward Huffstetler ...........................1
Pomo Basketweaving, Poison, and the Politics of Restoration
in Greg Sarris's Grand
Avenue by Michelle Burnham ................... 18
Review Essay: Indians in Indian Country by Scott Andrews .................
37
Book Reviews
Wolf and the Winds, by Frank Bird
Linderman, reviewed by
Márgara Averbach ........................................................................ 49
El Indio Jesús,
by Gilberto Chávez Ballejos and Shirley Hill Witt,
reviewed by James H. Cox ........................................................... 51
Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de
rayos, by Juan Felipe Herrara,
reviewed by Scot Guenter ............................................................ 54
Native American
Representations: First Encounters, Distorted
Images, and Literary Appropriations,
ed. by Gretchen M.
Bataille, reviewed by Penelope Kelsey
........................................ 57
Children of the Dragonfly:
Native American Voices on Child
Custody and Education, ed. by Robert
Bensen, reviewed by
Alicia Kent
.............................................................................. ..... 61
American Pentimento: The
Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of
Riches, by Patricia Seed, reviewed by Denise
MacNeil .............. 65
Outfoxing Coyote, by
Carolyn Dunn, reviewed by MariJo Moore ..... 72
Contributors
................................................................................................. 76
Conquistadors, by Stephen Graham Jones
................................................. 79
Announcements and Opportunities
........................................................... 81
Major Tribal Nations Mentioned in This
Issue ........................................ 89
Copyright © SAIL. After first printing in SAIL, copyright reverts to the author; we reserve the right to make SAIL available in electronic format.
ISSN 0730-3238
Production of this issue was supported by the University of
Richmond
and by Michigan State University.
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2002 ASAIL Patrons:
Gretchen Bataille
Helen Jaskoski
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A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
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and others who wish to remain anonymous
2002 Sponsors:
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William Clements
Susan Gardner
Connie Jacobs
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and others who wish to remain anonymous
{1}
Spirit Armies and Ghost Dancers: The Dialogic Nature of American Indian Resistance
Edward Huffstetler
Postmodern critical discussions
have created something of a dilemma for those of us
who routinely teach and write about Native American fiction. Are Native American texts the
most cutting edge examples of postmodern fiction, or do they stand in some sort of
undefined opposition to it? So far, there seems to be surprisingly little consensus on the
issue.
There are, of course, those critics for
whom postmodern discourse seems ideally suited
to Native American texts. Gerald Vizenor, in his collection of essays Narrative Chance:
Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, celebrates the connections
between postmodernism and Native American fiction, arguing that it liberates these texts to
be what they in fact should be, whereas modernism had the tendency, he argues, of
constraining American Indian authors to certain forms, certain discursive structures. In his
essay "Textual Perspectives and the Reader in The Surrounded," James Ruppert
sees Native
texts being particularly suited for postmodern study, since the connections between speech
and writing are at the core both of Native texts and deconstructionist criticism, and, as well,
the attention given to issues of power, à la Foucault's arguments. Caren Irr, in her essay
"The
Timeliness of Almanac of the Dead, or a Postmodern Reading of Radical Fiction,"
champions Silko as a "postmodern radical" and sees her novel as fulfilling Frederic Jameson's
call for a new, postmodern, political art (225). In his "The Dialogic of Silko's
Storyteller,"
Arnold Krupat (using the work of Mikhail Bakhtin) argues that Silko's narrative is (although
still thoroughly Pueblo in design) postmodern in that her voice is not a single author's voice,
but rather a communal "plurality of voices" (65). Gretchen Ronnow, using Jacques Lacan as
her starting point, argues in her essay "Tayo, Death, and Desire: A Lacanian Reading of
Ceremony" that Tayo eventually learns that his existence is really a series of
interconnected
stories, rather than the "primal unity" he imagined it was initially (69). And Catherine
Rainwater, in her work Dreams of Fiery Stars: the Transformations of Native American
Fiction, sees (like Vizenor) that postmodern expectations have made audiences, in
general,
more receptive to the strategies of Native American texts.
On the other hand, it is hard for us to
ignore that there are some aspects of postmodern
critical discussions that seem at times antithetical to the general thrust of most of the fiction.
The work of many {2} postmodernists,
post-structuralists, and post-Marxists, as Philip Brian
Harper outlines it in his work Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern
Culture, stands in direct opposition to some of the most basic concepts found in Native
American fiction. For instance, the notion that individuals living in the postmodern world are
unable to orient themselves in relation to objective reality--that we have lost any viable
connection we might have had to the past, that we can no longer see it as relevant and
continuous with the present--is sharply contrasted by most Native American narratives which
emphasize and reinforce those very connections. Too, the understanding of language as "pure
material signifiers," and the increasing disconnection seen between discourse and the reality it
supposedly represents seems a problematic argument for most American Indian authors as
well (Harper 8).
And, despite arguments to the
contrary, one would think that American Indian authors,
in general, are ill suited to respond to Frederic Jameson's call for a new postmodern fiction.
After all, Jameson makes postmodernist arguments that would seem contradictory to most
American Indian perspectives, such as his view that "postmodern is what you have when the .
. . process is complete and nature is gone for good" (Jameson ix). He argues that in the new
postmodern realities, the other is no longer nature, but technologies and the
power/knowledge they represent. He argues that in these new postmodern conditions, "the
past itself has disappeared" (Jameson 309). To Jameson, these patterns in postmodern
society are the results of our increasing interaction with technologies and the development of
what he calls (using Ernst Mandel's term) "late capitalism," an advanced stage of
capitalism
that is all encompassing and inescapable. In Jameson's understanding of things, American
Indian voices, American Indian visions, and American Indian religious traditions are simply
so many sets of ideas contributing to the postmodern monolith that society is becoming, one
more example of a people in the process of becoming, as Jean Baudrillard would say,
simulacra.
Jameson also argues that this new
political art, whatever it may be, must center its
efforts on the realities of late capitalism and the necessity for new "cognitive mapping" that is
not so much reorienting our spatial relationships as it is our social (Jameson 54). Jameson, of
course, sees this entire postmodern process as disconnected to the spatial, to nature if you
will. Most postmodernists (such as Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics for example)
tend to
see these forces in one way or another eradicating real space in favor of a new, virtual world.
But in Native American fiction generally (as Robert Nelson argues in his Place and
{3}
Vision, as Paula Gunn Allen points out in her essay "Iyani: It Goes This Way," and as
Leslie
Silko says in Yellow Woman), there can never truly be this disassociation with the
spatial
dimension, since it is through an active connection to the land that indigenous peoples define
themselves.
But, despite the uneasy fit, it can
certainly be argued that the most useful approach in
recent years has been in applying Mikhail Bakhtin's work to Native American texts. What
Sue Vice says of Gabriel Garcia Marquez can be said of American Indian authors as well.
They are, to use current post-colonial jargon, hybrid writers, and hybrid writers by definition
are "open to two worlds" and therefore more open to the naturally dialogic interplay of
storytelling (64). In fact, Bakhtinian discussions of carnival and its upsetting of established
social order, as well as the very concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism seem
especially
compatible to Native American studies discussions of trickster tales and examinations of the
ongoing nature of communal discourse, which often result in multi-authored, collaborative
texts.
David Moore, in his essay
"Decolonializing Criticism: Reading Dialectics and Dialogics
in Native American Literatures," using James Clifford's landmark work, The Predicament
of
Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, argues for a new critical
approach to Native American texts, an approach based on an understanding of the dialogic
nature of both the cultures and the texts those cultures produce. Clifford, who himself applies
Bakhtin, not to texts alone but to a new understanding of the epistemological dynamics of
culture itself, provides Moore with his starting point. Clifford contrasts two opposing modes
of thinking, two opposing modes of cultural interaction--one dualistic, seeing the range of
responses leading to one of two possibilities, either resistance to or
absorption by the
dominant culture--and the other dialogic, which describes interactions that form what Moore
calls a "nexus of exchanges" between cultures (9). Moore then further defines the difference
between the terms dialectic and dialogic, the one leading to hegemonic synthesis and the
other to an ongoing cultural polyphony, one in which none of the diversity of voices or
influences become normative. The three terms, dualistic, dialectic, and dialogic, express for
Moore the dynamics of cultural interaction and ultimately express the interactive nature of
everything from Native American art to Native American religious traditions to Native
American politics. He says that "'resistance' would equal a dualistic pattern; 'absorption'
would equal a dialectic pattern; and a 'nexus' of exchange would equal a dialogic . . . and
exchange would be a dialogism of multiple voices in collaboration,{4} not in a utopian sense
but in a sense of mutual cultural dynamics . . ." (17).
The importance of Moore's work is
that seeing American Indian texts (as well as
political responses and identity as a whole) as the result of dialogic interaction with the
dominant culture rather than as the limited response of dualism offers us a much more useful
understanding of the dynamics of exchange we find in the texts themselves, as well as in the
broader cultures. Too, just as Clifford and others such as Kenneth Gergen suggest, it places
the proper emphasis on the ongoing and shifting cultural relations rather than on rigid
definition and synthesis. What this means in practical terms is the recognition that American
Indians and American Indian authors are engaged in a "third way," something beyond simple
resistance to or absorption by the dominant culture, that they can use
the dynamics of
exchange to define themselves and ultimately insure their cultures' survival. Understanding
the dialogic nature of cultural exchange, Moore suggests, is the key to understanding these
texts. As long as we see Native American fiction through the lens of dualism or dialectics, we
will ignore its dialogic context and ignore the cultural dynamics it helps to illuminate.
But as helpful as Bakhtin or Clifford
can be in understanding these issues and as
important and timely as Moore's call for a new critical approach may be, there is something
not quite satisfying in a strict Bakhtinian reading of Native American texts. Perhaps Arnold
Krupat is right when he suggests in his essay "The Dialogic Nature of Silko's
Storyteller" that
even though the storyteller is "open to a plurality of voices. . . . What keeps it from entering
the poststructuralist, postmodernist or schizophrenic heteroglossic domain is its commitment
to the equivalent of a normative voice. . . . For all the polyvocal openness of Silko's work,
there is always the unabashed commitment to Pueblo ways as a referent point" (65). The
issue is further complicated, from Moore's standpoint at least, by the realization that this
commitment to a collective normative voice is often strongly linked to American Indian
resistance-- whether political, social, or spiritual.
What this suggests is that the
collective normative voice that Krupat hears is often (at
least in practice if not in theory) a dualistic instead of a dialogic voice. The "nexus of
exchange" that Moore describes so well often becomes, in the hands of American Indians
authors, yet another means of resistance. Rather than insisting on understanding the dialogic
process as evolutionary and inclusive, as the ongoing dynamic of cultural exchange that
affects all parties involved equally, it might be more appropriate to recognize the ways in
which American Indian authors {5} acknowledge this
open process, yet ultimately see it as
yet another tool (or weapon) at their disposal. The dialogic process that Moore describes is
certainly there, but the stance of resistance remains firmly there as well.
The Ghost Dance as a "Nexus of Resistance" As Well As Exchange
One way to illustrate the
simultaneous nature of this cultural interaction is to take a
recurring idea in the cultures--preferably one that resonates in the literature with some
frequency--and examine how that idea functions within the dynamics of exchange. The Ghost
Dance as a concept, and as a recurring image in many texts, is an ideal choice because much
has already been said about its inherent dialogic structure. Michael Shermer, in his essay
"God and the Ghost Dance," and even James Mooney himself in his turn of the century work,
The Ghost Dance, speaks of the historical ceremony as a curious blending of
American
Indian beliefs and Christianity, of a peaceful, religious premonition that became a fierce
expression of apocalyptic defiance. The Ghost Dance phenomenon itself is a wonderful
example of a point of dialogic exchange between the religions of a variety of cultures, and it
clearly functioned as a nexus, or conduit, between these shifting and differing contexts. The
Ghost Dance, as a phenomenon, as a philosophy, as a religious movement, was not wholly
"Native" nor was it wholly "Christian," but became a new dialogic expression of a third
context, a polyvocal context within which these cultures could redefine themselves and
attempt to survive in a dangerously shifting world. We can see this new context in the term
Ghost Dance itself, which is a strained translation of the Lakota phrase wanagi
waipi. The
word ghost, or spirit, takes on new shades of meaning in cultures with radically differing
views concerning the importance of ancestors.
But, at the same time that the cultural
exchange that resulted in the Ghost Dance was
occurring, there was also no question that the purpose of the ritual, despite Wovoka's
understanding of it (if we are to believe Mooney), became one of defiance and resistance. It
became a potent symbol for Plains Indians in the late 19th century, and it has
become an
image used again and again by contemporary American Indian authors from Power to Alexie
to Silko, and it has always meant the same thing: a continuation of the struggle on whatever
level in whatever context is possible. As Silko's character Angelita La Escapía in
Almanac of
the Dead points out, ideologies do not matter, theories do not matter--the {6} people will
use whatever they have to, whatever is at hand (Almanac 310).
To see more clearly how this "nexus
of resistance" works, let's examine four
occurrences of it in recent fiction. The dialogic nature of images of resistance, including but
not limited to the Ghost Dance, can be seen, for instance, in Susan Power's The Grass
Dancer. We see evidence of the dialogic exchange that Moore speaks of in a variety of
places in the novel. When Red Dress appears to Calvin Wind Soldier in a vision, she speaks
in two voices, one Dakota and one English. She carries a war shield in one hand and three
lassos in her other and tells Calvin that these things are "evidence of [her] success" (188).
She then uses the lassos in order to snare him to get his "complete attention" (189). Herod
Small War tells Jeanette McVay that despite her mixed-blood baby's appearance, she needs
to "tell her two stories," otherwise she'll "stand off-balance . . . and talk out of both sides of
her mouth" (284). Even in characters such as Pumpkin, who has mixed blood and yet is also
extremely spiritual, a healer, a woman with "plenty of soul to spare," (45) we find evidence
of Moore's "nexus of exchange," that "dialogism of multiple voices in collaboration" that
constitutes a revised, heteroglotic context in which American Indian characters redefine
themselves and what it means to be American Indians.
And yet, we are also reminded that
despite these many voices, despite the redefinition,
the goal of resistance remains unaltered. Harley sees his grandmother Margaret Many
Wounds on television dancing on the moon during the first Apollo moonwalk in order to
remind him that despite such technological advances, "there is still magic in the world" (114).
Not surprisingly, we find the strongest mention of resistance in Power's evocation of the
Ghost Dance where we are reminded of the same message of hope--Red Dress speaks
directly of her desire for hope and how she "blew a refreshing wind" in the faces of the Ghost
Dancers (255). And, in her final message to Harley, she reminds him that he, too, "is dancing
a rebellion" (299).
That message of rebellion is even
more explicitly born out in Sherman Alexie's Indian
Killer. On one level, one could say that the novel is principally about what constitutes
Indian
identity. And that identity is clearly not about bloodlines, since the protagonist John Smith is
a full blood without a trace of "Indianness," while mixed blood characters like Reggie
Polatkin presumably epitomize it. But more importantly, the very images to which Native
peoples respond in Alexie's work are mixed images coming from various contexts that
coalesce into distinct dialogic points of connection, the way his paintings, with their {7}
mixed images of traditional Spokane and Christian symbols, function for Father Duncan or
the way the stained glass image of the dying Jesuits ultimately functions for John.
And again, we find at the center of the
book the Ghost Dance as an image, with an
Indian Killer who is the direct result of the Dance's spiritual energy, if we are to believe the
theory Marie Polatkin suggests to Professor Mather. Marie tells him that although he admires
the Ghost Dance as a symbol, and although he thinks of it as uniting Christian and American
Indian beliefs into one vision of beauty and peace, he is very much mistaken. If the Ghost
Dance ever works, she says, ". . . there would be no exceptions. . . . All you white people
would disappear. All of you" (314). The chilling end of the novel, with the Killer leading a
modern day Ghost Dance, inviting more and more Indians to dance, promising never to stop,
is an explicit reminder that even though the Dance may be the result of dialogic cultural
exchange, an even though each culture's input can be seen, there is no mistaking what the
Dance ultimately signifies.
When we look at Silko's work,
evidence for the dynamics of resistance can be seen
everywhere and often in its clearest form. For instance, we see from the start in Silko's work
that the process of dialogic exchange that Moore describes is, for her, a matter of course. In
Almanac of the Dead, for example, we see a whole world that has become
completely
entangled, European and Native. We have characters like Angelita la Escapía and El Feo
and
their extensive discussions of Marxism, which for them is intertwined with Native beliefs and
forms an ideal example of a political and spiritual "nexus of exchange." But it is made clear
to us that for them, Marxist ideas are, in the end, not important. They are simply a tool, one
more means to regain the land, which is the only goal that really matters. If that aim requires
embracing communism or taking money from Cuba, if it means incorporating Marx's voice
into the heteroglotic mix, so be it. But it does not in the slightest change the nature of the
struggle. We may see a great deal of evidence in the novel for an ongoing dialogic and
polyvocal "nexus of exchange," but by the end of Almanac, we have an indigenous
spirit
army sweeping up from the south and Lecha's dream of a future in which she sees American
Indians "crowding the streets of Amsterdam" (756).
In Silko's more recent Gardens
in the Dunes, we see this pattern again. In this work as
in Almanac, one of the central images of resistance is the Ghost Dance, and its
essential
dialogic nature is one of its principle features. She introduces the image by describing in
some detail Wovoka's vision, explaining how he saw Jesus and that "Jesus was very {8}
angry with white people," asking the Paiutes and all Native people to dance and bring on the
"great storm clouds" that would "gather over the entire world" (25). Too, the nature of the
dialogic exchange is seen to go both ways between the two cultures--Jesus is seen by the
Paiutes as a means to speak to the dead and as a conduit to the ancestors, and Wovoka is
seen as a new Messiah by the white Mormons who also come to dance. We are told that the
Messiah, when he appears, speaks in many languages at once, using many voices (33).
And yet, we see again that the
ultimate purpose is the retaking and restoring of the land.
As Vedna reads from the Bible, for instance, Sister Salt hears Wovoka's message of a spirit
army rising up (362). When the dancers are dispersed in the final scene, we see Sister Salt
and Vedna react with fury and defiance, and Hattie as well, whose defiance culminates with
her setting an apocalyptic fire that sweeps through the town of Needles (475). And
afterwards, with the help of Hattie's money, the people survive and the struggle continues.
"Something terrible had struck there," Silko says, "but . . . it was gone. . . . Sister Salt could
feel the change" (479).
It is significant that the scene at the
old gardens at the end of the novel is positive and
hopeful about the future, especially since that future involves many aspects of the world
outside the gardens. The place is teeming with an array of outside influences. Linnaeus, the
monkey, and Rainbow, the parrot, are, of course, not indigenous creatures. Many of the
plants are from distant places, including the gladiolus spuds and the orchids. The little
grandfather, who seems to have such spiritual energy, is, of course, part African-American.
But despite all the new, the old gardens are slowly being restored. By the end, even the
rattlesnake has returned (479).
The process Moore describes is
clearly at work in these novels. They do often depict a
new context, a dialogic "nexus of exchange." But, this dialogic context often exists
simultaneous to, and even becomes an extension of, the ongoing and deeply rooted pattern of
Native resistance. As Gerald Vizenor made clear in his essay "Native American Indian
Literature: Critical Metaphors of the Ghost Dance," Native American works themselves can
be seen as the literary equivalent of a Ghost Dance, both in terms of their inclusion of things
non-Indian (such as the English language, and European literary forms, for instance)
and in
terms of their decidedly Indian purpose, which is to create, primarily, "a literature of
liberation that enlivens tribal survivance" (Vizenor, Ghost Dance 227).
To fully understand this "literature of
liberation," however, we need to more fully
understand the nature of the spirituality that gives rise to it {9} --and at its core, it is
spirituality that both defines and drives the struggle (which is yet another reason the image of
the Ghost Dance is so apropos). To better understand this relationship, we should turn to a
particular work, a work that would best illustrate the connections between Native religious
traditions and "the 500-year struggle." That work, with all of its controversies, is Leslie
Silko's Almanac of the Dead.
Spirit Armies on the Move: Silko's Particular Blend of Spirituality and Resistance
In Silko's Almanac of the
Dead, we have a world where dialogical, polyvocal exchanges
between cultures are the norm, a landscape where many voices are heard with equal clarity.
And yet, the spirituality that permeates the book--and its political message of resistance--is
particularly consistent and unmistakable. But, because the Indian nature of the spirituality is
not fully understood by many readers and because some postmodern critics would have us
ignore its significance in any case, the novel has suffered some rather curious criticism.
Leslie Silko, despite the theoretical
discourse surrounding her work and despite the
praise that many critics have for her novels, has actively rejected any sort of postmodern
label, as such critics as Daria Donnelly, Arnold Krupat, and Susan Perez Castillo have all
pointed out, because in her view, postmodernism severs the connection between "language
and community, history and cosmology," a condition Silko would find essentially untenable
(Donnelly 249). In fact, in her review of Louise Erdrich's The Beet Queen, Silko
condemns
Erdrich for writing just such "postmodern" prose, using a stylistic, ethereal language that
nevertheless manages to ignore the reality it is meant to depict (Silko, Review 10).
In her work, this reality is not ignored;
it is the central issue. At the heart of the political
message in Almanac, of course, are the ancient prophecies (which are found
virtually
everywhere--in the Mayan codices, in the sacred stone snake, in the various visions of
shaman, including Wovoka's vision of the Ghost Dance) that foretell the end of European
dominance in the Americas. How we understand or misunderstand these prophecies
determines in large part how we understand or misunderstand Silko's novel.
Is the premise of indigenous peoples
taking over the Americas simply "naïve to the
point of silliness," as Sven Birkerts suggested in his initial review (41), a statement we all
hope he by now regrets? Or is Silko a literary genius writing the ultimate postmodern novel,
complete with a virtual revolution? Or perhaps she is consciously aligning herself
{10} with
a wide range of Marxists and post-Marxists, most of whom argue in one form or another
similar notions of historical inevitability? Whether we see these prophecies as naïve or as
marginalized messages from increasingly irrelevant subcultures struggling to make
themselves heard over the din of postmodernism, it seems clear that because of this varied
discourse few take Silko at her word and believe what she spends the entire novel trying so
hard to tell us. At stake in this discussion is the very authenticity of Silko's vision, of Native
American fiction in general, and perhaps even--on some level--of Indian sensibility itself, a
sensibility that remains, despite the postmodern forces that sometimes overshadow the
critical discourse, deeply spiritual and tenaciously rooted in the land itself.
In her collection of essays,
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, Silko says it this
way: "The prophecies foretelling the arrival of the Europeans to the Americas also say that
over this long time, all things European will eventually disappear. The prophecies do not say
the European people themselves will disappear, only their customs" (125). It's this idea that
Birkerts found contrary to "what we know both of the structures of power and the
psychology of the oppressed" (41).
But the prophecies that foretell the
end of European domination in Silko's novel, and
the belief systems that support those prophecies, are not merely a manageable context from
which to create a new political discourse, not merely a clever means to offer some new
American Indian argument for historical inevitability. No, these prophetic elements in the
novel, these religious proclamations, are radically political in nature, but are also deeply
spiritual, whether they come from the ancient codices themselves, or the visions of people
like the Barefoot Hopi or the twins Tacho and El Feo, or the stone snake on the Laguna
reservation, or the nineteenth-century vision of the Ghost Dance. As Silko reminds us in
Yellow Woman, the process of European removal that these prophecies foretell has
"already
begun to happen, and . . . it is a spiritual process that no armies will be able to stop"
(Yellow
Woman 125).
There is European influence
everywhere in her novel, and there are many examples of
attempts to adopt and assimilate European ideas into American Indian contexts. But
ultimately these attempts are limited and destined to fail. And Silko makes it clear that the
main problem with the Europeans in the Americas, despite their obvious influence on
American Indian cultures, is their lack of spirituality and their inability to recognize the
sacred, especially the sacredness associated with the land, with the earth, itself. As Calabazas
tells Root, whites cannot appreciate differences, and those "who can't learn to appreciate the
world's differences {11} won't make it"
(Almanac 203). The ancestors and elders say that the
most dangerous quality of the Europeans is that they suffer "a sort of blindness to the world"
(Almanac 224). They cannot recognize differences in ordinary rocks, differences in
land
formations, differences in Indian peoples themselves. And since, from an American Indian
perspective, all these things are sacred, this "blindness to the world" amounts to a spiritual
blindness.
Menardo's Indian grandfather called
Europeans "the orphan people" because their God
had created them, but had soon become furious with them, driving them from their
birthplace, their sacred land. Consequently, they were no longer able to "recognize [that] the
earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering
aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them"
(Almanac 258).
Clinton, in his radio broadcasts, argues that "the Europeans [have] been without a god since
their arrival in the Americas," despite all the praying and the trappings of their religion. He
points out the irony that the white man's God died, in philosophical terms, about the same
time that white men started sailing around the world in the sixteenth century
(Almanac 417).
The Barefoot Hopi says that "Europeans [do] not listen to the souls of their dead. That [is]
the root of all trouble for Europeans" (Almanac 604). And this spiritual blankness,
this
disregard for the sacred, is at the heart of the duplicitous web of conspiracies in and around
Tucson, the corruption that we see on all social levels, a kind of spiritual sickness, cruel and
voyeuristic, that permeates all of white society.
Even Marxism, which is seen in the
novel as an genuine attempt by white society to
better re-establish itself and re-connect to something communal, even tribal, to get away
from the destructive social hierarchies that fragment and divide western culture, the same
Marxism/post-Marxism which provides a backdrop against which Jameson paints his theories
of the realities of late capitalism, even these ideas can only take us so far and no further.
Why? Because the concepts that constitute Marxism aren't grounded in the sacred. As
Angelita, La Escapía, points out, Marx was European, and "he and those following after
him
had understood the possibilities of communal consciousness only imperfectly"
(Almanac
291). Without the spirituality which underpins them, these concepts become abstract and
meaningless. Also, as Angelita later points out, the lack of spirituality allows them to commit
heinous crimes against the land and the people, crimes that have soiled the hands of
communists in the Americas, crimes for which the tribal peoples can never forgive them. She
tells us over and over that though she admires Marx's ideas {12} in many ways, all she and
other tribal people really care about is the land. All that really matters is the land, "that was
their secret and the only 'truth' tribes could agree upon" (Almanac 310).
To the indigenous people, Marxism's
lack of spirituality and lack of connection to the
sacred land means ultimately that it will fail in the Americas. Angelita describes how she
imagines Marx and Engels must have waited for revolution to come and how they must have
been disappointed when it had not. She says they failed because they misunderstood two very
important things. "They had not understood that the earth was mother to all beings," meaning
that although it might have been appropriate to dismiss European Christianity, it was not
appropriate to ignore indigenous beliefs in the sacredness of the land because to do that is to
disconnect themselves from that which gives them life and to disconnect themselves from
history--the very conditions that postmodernists like Paul Virilio bemoan. The other point
that Angelita says Marx and Engels misunderstood was the importance of the spirit beings,
meaning that they dismissed any notion of the spiritual continuity between the ancestors and
the communal principles they were trying to reestablish, between the ancestors and the
history they were trying to analyze (Almanac 749).
And this becomes a key criticism of
Marxism in the novel because as Silko reminds us
again and again, the people's revolution itself is the wishes of the ancestors, the spirit beings,
and by extension, the land itself. We are told, for instance by El Feo, that the revolutionaries
were not listening to leaders because they could be corrupted. Instead, they were listening to
the voices in their heads, which were "the voices out of the past, the . . . voices of the
ancestors" (Almanac 513). El Feo also reminds Angelita that the retaking of the
Americas by
tribal people is "what earth's spirits wanted" (Almanac 712). It is the same message
that
Wilson Weasel Tail writes poetry about, the connection between the spirit beings' desires and
the goal of retaking the land. It is also the basis of the Ghost Dance that he evokes in his
poetry (Almanac 724).
In Silko's novel, and in Native
American cultures themselves, these connections with the
ancestor spirits and with the land are not merely casual expressions of some earlier Native
belief system, nor are they the marginalized constructs that people such as Jameson would
simply stack onto the growing postmodern monolith of contrasting and varying ideas. For
Silko, identity itself is dependent on these connections, identity as a collective people, as a
tribe, as human beings. And, as Silko has said in almost everything she has ever written, these
connections to the sacred {13} are made and kept strong
via the stories that describe them
and celebrate them.
To illustrate this collective
consciousness, Silko tells an anecdote in Yellow Woman
about witnessing people in a Yaqui village coming out of their houses at the same moment to
attend a funeral of one of their neighbors. The sight stuck with her and served to remind her
that "to be a people . . . is the dimension of human identity that anthropology understands
least . . . this is where [the Yaqui's] power as a culture lies: with this shared consciousness of
being part of a living community that continues on and on, beyond the death of one or even
of many . . ." (Yellow Woman 90). She goes on to discuss the nature of storytelling
in her
own Pueblo culture and how it functions to establish these communal bonds that reach
beyond death and connect individual identity to something larger, something historic. She
says, ". . . storytelling had the effect of placing an incident in the wider context of Pueblo
history so that individual loss or failure was less personalized and became part of the village's
eternal narratives about loss and failure, narratives that identify the village and that tell the
people who they are" (Yellow Woman 91).
Daria Donnelly, in her essay "Old and
New Notebooks: Almanac of the Dead as
Revolutionary Entertainment," discusses the link between storytelling and Silko's political
purpose in Almanac, pointing out first that there has been a shift in the social
sciences in
general toward re-conceiving "history as the struggle for domination between competing
stories" (Donnelly 245). She then argues that critics who hail Silko as a postmodernist
because of her attention to marginal stories, her willingness to include "everyone's
testimony," as Donnelly says, "misapprehend the almanac, which is not meant to be a site of
social commentary, but rather of proliferating storytelling" . . . and that in Almanac of the
Dead, Silko had become even more interested in "the power of stories to create and
account
for reality" (Donnelly 254).
But we need to always bear in
mind--and it is something we invariably tend to forget,
which is why Silko spends so much time reminding us--that this power stories have is a
sacred power, serving religious as well as a political purposes and involving the spirit beings
that inhabit the land. Angelita points out to the indigenous crowds that "the stories of the
people or their history [have] always been sacred, the source of their entire existence . . . the
ancestors' spirits [are] summoned by the stories . . . that within history reside relentless
forces, powerful spirits, vengeful, relentlessly seeking justice" (Almanac 316).
Angelita tells
them later that "in the stories, the people [live] on in the imaginations and hearts of their
descendants. Wherever their stories [are] told,{14} the
spirits of the ancestors [are] present
and their power [is] alive" (Almanac 520). And the trouble with Marx, the reason
Marxism
will ultimately fail in the Americas, she tells her audience, is that Marx "did not understand
the power of the stories [belongs] to the spirits of the dead" (Almanac 521).
The continuity between the ancestor
spirits and the living community, between the
living community and the land itself, between the land and the spirits that inhabit it form the
very fabric of the what Silko calls the 500-year resistance, the 500-year war of indigenous
peoples, and all those characters in the novel who help create that fabric understand its
spiritual nature. Wilson Weasel Tail, we are told, abandoned the study of law to pursue
poetry because "poetry would speak to the spirits" and "set the people free"
(Almanac 713).
In his performance poetry itself, he calls forth the ancestor spirits, especially his Lakota
ancestors who once danced the Ghost Dance.
Furthermore, Silko's Weasel Tail also
tells us that this spiritual connection to the Ghost
Dance has always been misunderstood. That anthropologists and others had assumed that the
tribal peoples had become disillusioned when the ghost shirts did not stop bullets and the
Europeans had not vanished overnight. But this was not true. The people knew all along that
the shirts "belonged to the realm of the spirits" and offered spiritual protection, not physical
protection, and that this kind of protection was, in the end, far more important
(Almanac
722). Just like Menardo, who misunderstands the true nature of power and seeks physical
protection with his bulletproof vest rather than the spiritual protection offered by Tacho and
his visions against the corrupting influence of power and money, Europeans (and those like
Menardo who would be European) have difficulty seeing past their own noses. They are
blind to the world, as Silko says, disconnected to the land and the people and history itself.
The true purpose of the Ghost Dance, Weasel Tail reminds us, was not to help them repel the
soldiers' bullets, but was rather an elaborate attempt to "reunite living people with the spirits
of beloved ancestors lost in the five-hundred-year war" (Almanac 722).
It seems ironic that it is precisely this
spirituality, with its curious mixture of
images--these connections to the land and to the community and to the ancestors--that
causes Silko to be so often misunderstood. If Sven Birkerts had understood this spiritual
power, he might not have found Silko's premise so far-fetched. If postmodern critics truly
understood this spiritual significance, perhaps they would not be as inclined to categorically
dismiss it as irrelevant. But then, as old Yoeme {15}
tells us in the novel, white people have
always hated to hear anything about spirits because spirits are immune to bribes and threats,
spirits cannot be dealt with in the way the whites have always dealt with the world, through
argument and violence. "Against the spirits," she says, "the white man [is] impotent"
(Almanac 581).
There is no question that the cultural
elements and images available to Silko and other
American Indian authors are dialogic in nature and that understanding the interaction of
exchange in everything from religion to politics and beyond is necessary in order to track the
full scope of the polyvocal dynamics at work here. But in the final analysis, the purpose
remains primarily an "Indian" purpose--one of resistance and a political struggle to survive,
but a struggle that also remains thoroughly and completely spiritual.
Joy Harjo, in her review, "The World
is Round: Some Notes on Leslie Silko's Almanac
of the Dead," tells an anecdote to illustrate--in Indian fashion--the problem for many
postmodern critics who so often fail to understand the spiritual and political complexity of
Silko's (or, for that matter, any other American Indian author's) achievement. She tells a
story about the time two tricksters, arrogant academics who thought they represented the
last word in American literature, active postmodern poets who had received many rewards
from the literary community, came to the University of New Mexico and delivered their
cutting-edge ideas before a packed audience. She tells us that their "trickster downfall will be
similar to that of others in this country who believe there was nothing in this land until they
arrived. They will find nothing. The world is still flat for them. There are no curves, no
horizon. But the world is round. That is the trick. Everything turns back on them" (Harjo
210). In spiritual terms, critics will find in these stories only those truths they bring to them.
And unless those who study these novels--whether they represent a flawed, fragmented
collection of marginal voices or radical, new experiments in postmodern fiction--finally
understand the roundness of their full spiritual, as well as political, dimensions, then the
criticism surrounding them will often sound hollow and flat.
{16}
WORKS CITED
Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer. New York: Warner Books, 1996.
Allen, Paula Gunn. "Iyani: It Goes This Way." The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary American Indian Literature. Ed. Geary Hobson. Albuquerque: U of NM P, 1980. 191-93.
Birkerts, Sven. "Apocalypse Now." Rev. of Almanac of the Dead, by Leslie Marmon Silko. New Republic 4 November 1991:41
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1988.
Donnelly, Daria. "Old and New Notebooks: Almanac of the Dead as Revolutionary Entertainment." Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Louise Barnett and James Thorson. Albuquerque: U of NM P, 1999. 245-260.
Harjo, Joy. "The World Is Round: Some Notes on Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Blue Mesa Review 4 (Spring 1992):207-10.
Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. New York: Oxford U P, 1994.
Irr, Caren. "The Timeliness of Almanac of the Dead, or a Postmodern Reading of Radical Fiction." Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Louise Barnett and James Thorson. Albuquerque: U of NM P, 1999. 223-244.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke U P, 1991.
Krupat, Arnold. "The Dialogic of Silko's Storyteller." Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures . Albuquerque: U of NM P, 1989.
Mooney, James. The Ghost Dance. North Dighton, MA: JG Press, 1996.
Moore, David L. "Decolonializing Criticism: Reading Dialectics and Dialogics in Native American Literatures." SAIL 6:4 Winter 1994.
Nelson, Robert. Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.
Power, Susan. The Grass Dancer. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994.
Rainwater, Catherine. Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction. Philadelphia: U of PA P, 1999.
Ronnow, Gretchen. "Tayo, Death, and Desire: A Lacanian Reading of Ceremony." Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: U of NM P, 1989.
Shermer, Michael. "God and the Ghost Dance." Skeptic 5:3 1997.
{17}
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin Books,
1991.
--. Gardens in the Dunes. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.
--. "Here's An Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf." Review of Louise Erdrich's The Beet Queen. Impact/Albuquerque Journal 8 Oct. 1986:10-11.
--. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.
Vizenor, Gerald. Ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: U of NM P, 1989.
--. "Native American Indian Literature: Critical Metaphors of the Ghost Dance." World Literature Today 66: 2 Spring 1992.
Edward Huffstetler is a Professor of English and American Literature at Bridgewater College of Virginia where he teaches (among other things) courses in Native American literatures and cultures, Nineteenth-century American literature, Twentieth-century American literature, and creative writing. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa (1988) and has published a collection of Native myths, Tales of Native America (Michael Friedman Publishing, 1996) as well as articles on a wide variety of subjects from Walt Whitman to avant garde primitivist poets such as Jerome Rothenberg, to Native American authors such as Leslie Silko and Louise Erdrich. He also publishes poetry and fiction.
{18}
Pomo Basketweaving, Poison, and the Politics of Restoration in Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue
Michelle Burnham
In the first story of Greg Sarris's
Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories, fourteen-year-old
Jasmine describes the mural that her Aunt Faye has painted on the front wall of her home: a
"big green forest" with "dark trunks and thick green leaves" to which Faye over time has
added a series of crosses in pink fingernail polish (GA 9).1 Each
cross represents an incident
of poisoning in the family's past, poison which, she explains, "can circle around and get
someone in your family. It's everywhere" (4). When Faye's sister steals her new boyfriend, for
example, the theft marks the return of the "man poison" (20) that first infected Faye when, as
a young girl, she stole a lover from her cousin Anna (21). The poison's return leads Faye to
modify further the painting on her wall, by drawing "circles around many of the crosses and
connect[ing] them with lines from one to another. . . . [in] what looked like a black crayon"
(20). As Faye's fear and anger grow, she eventually covers the entire painting with the
crayon, leaving it entirely "Black, except for the edges here and there where you could see a
bit of green from the trees underneath" (23). Faye's painting is a history, a narrative, a
genealogy; it depicts the pattern that poison has woven over and through time in her family.
The interconnected lines that bind family members to each other have become buried within
the blackness of an oblivion brought on by the fear of poison and the separation and silence
caused by it.
Grand Avenue is itself a
complex genealogical narrative that weaves together eleven
separate stories told in ten different narrative voices. While one of these is an omniscient,
third-person narrative (a significant detail to which I will return later in this essay), the others
are first-person accounts by various members of the large and fragmented family of Sam
Toms, the universally disliked patriarch and eldest surviving descendant of Juana Maria, a
Pomo bear person.2 It is Sam Toms who is one of the central sources of poison in
the family
and the book, and the individual tales of disease, poverty, conflict, and dispossession that
make up Grand Avenue might be said--very much like Faye's painting--to track and
record
the routes and returns of this poison. But the novel ultimately suggests--in both its structure
and its content--that healing depends on the messy interconnectedness of these stories and
the characters who people them. The ceremonial release of poison and the restoration of an
interracial community require the recognition that stories, family and {19} cultural histories,
are marked as much by disruption and mixture as they are by uniformity and continuity.
The final story/chapter of the book is
narrated by Nellie, the Pomo elder, healer and
basketweaver whose power to cure poisonings and disease arrived to her through the songs
of a green frog. Through the course of this last account Nellie watches her young relative
Alice weave "a medium-sized coiled holding basket" in which the design of "a large
sunflower radiat[es] up from the bottom of the basket" (224). Nellie's earlier attempts to
instruct her granddaughter Darlene in the rituals and techniques of Pomo basketweaving have
all failed, but as she watches Alice's basket and its sunflower grow, she suddenly recognizes
that "it happened. It came around in a full circle, a picture I could understand, flowers and
two people holding hands. This basket has power" (229), she realizes. In the book's final
paragraph, a small green frog appears and delivers sacred songs to Alice. Thus the dark
binding lines drawn by the power of poison in Grand Avenue are met and
counteracted by
the coils of willow, sedge and song that restore Pomo healing traditions in and through the
practice of basketweaving.
Faye's painting and Alice's basket--the
opening and closing images in Grand
Avenue--represent the intertwined powers and practices of storytelling and
basketweaving.
Despite being classified and marketed as a novel, the form of Grand Avenue--like
so many
other Native American novels by writers as different as Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and
Susan Power--exposes Western literary categories like "novel," "chapter," or "short story" as
insufficient, inaccurate, and inappropriate to describe either the parts or the whole of this
book. In many ways, the covers of the paperback edition of Grand Avenue already
instigate a
kind of categorical mischief. The publisher's description of the book on the back cover, for
instance, describes it as Sarris's "unforgettable first novel," while the blurb from
Sherman
Alexie printed immediately below this paragraph praises "Greg Sarris's stories"
(emphases
added). The book's two-part title--Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories--seems at
once to
cause and to resolve such confusion, since it simultaneously adopts and resists an alliance
with these genres. Prompted by such cues, my students often question and debate whether
Grand Avenue is a novel, a collection of short stories, or something else
altogether.
The book's deliberately complex
engagement with such generic categories might
suggest that Sarris--like many native writers before him--is exploiting the novel's
heteroglossic elements to engage in a form of what James Ruppert calls cultural mediation,
or the process of {20} bringing both Native and Western
cultural traditions into a mutually
enriching dialogue aimed at recreating communities and selves (3). Jace Weaver has more
recently argued, however, that critical interest in cultural mediation must be balanced with an
attention to what he calls "communitism," or the activist production within Native literatures
of a healing Native community (36, xiii). In fact, if we look at Grand Avenue less
in the
context of novel theory and more in the tribally-specific context of Pomo basketmaking, then
the communitist shape, meaning, and function of the text come into greater
relief.3
Indeed, Sarris's own reflections on
Native American literature and the dynamics of
storytelling suggest that his interest may not be in mediation so much as in the kind of healing
political remainder produced out of the dialogic dimensions of storytelling. Although
surprisingly little critical attention has as yet been given to his own works of
fiction,4 once we
put his fiction and non-fiction into dialogue with each other, Grand Avenue takes
shape as
itself a kind of literary Pomo basket whose intersubjective weave functions not only to hold
the stories together, but to ceremonially restore and heal Native community. As its subtitle
indicates, Grand Avenue occupies a space both inside and outside such categories
as novel
and story, where not only the intersubjective elements of oral storytelling can be reclaimed,
but where the political possibilities of that intersubjectivity might be imagined and achieved.
In an article written just after the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (formerly the
Federated Coast Miwok) regained federal recognition in December 2000, five-term tribal
chairman Greg Sarris outlines the more explicitly political and spiritual functions of
interconnectivity when he asks
isn't a ceremony, in the best sense of the word, that which reconnects us to one another and the world around us and thus revives well-being and strength? And isn't the recognition of our relation to one another the first, and undoubtedly the most important, prerequisite 'to put back into existence' a tribe and all that that means, its health, its courage, its hope once again for a home? ("First" 13).
Osage scholar Robert Warrior has argued that "the struggle for sovereignty is not a struggle to be free from the influence of anything outside ourselves, but a process of asserting the power we possess as communities and individuals to make decisions that affect our lives" (124).5 If we see Grand Avenue in the context of this struggle for sovereignty, the book emerges as a textual version of a Pomo basket whose weaving recounts {21} and performs a healing ceremony of restoration that re-members the bonds weakened by colonialism and its poisonous legacies of separation and fear.
* * *
In his critical study
Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American
Indian Texts, Sarris theorizes storytelling by weaving together reflections on the work of
contemporary literary and cultural theorists with reflections on his own interactions with his
aunt, the Pomo healer and basketweaver Mabel McKay. Sarris notes as a fundamental
dimension of storytelling what Bakhtin in his theory of the novel calls heteroglossia or the
diversity of intersecting voices and languages. Sarris further observes that Bakhtin aligns
novelistic storytelling not only with polyvocality but with an intersubjectivity that, as David
Bleich observes, is contained within novels but is also elicited by the practice of reading them
(KS 4-5). Storytelling, in this sense, brings us into intimate contact with the
languages and
worlds of other people and communities. Sarris repeatedly practices the very theory he
describes in Keeping Slug Woman Alive: among the voices of literary theorists,
ethnographers, and philosophers appear the voices of Mabel McKay and of Sarris himself,
who meditates on the difficulties of recording her voice. Sarris charts his own and others'
dialogues and interactions with McKay in order to locate elements of those exchanges that
escape dominant understandings of storytelling. While some of the stories she tells, for
example, include narrative properties that one might expect of traditional Western stories
(like a beginning, middle, and end), other kinds of what Sarris simply calls her "talk" work to
prompt the kind of "dialogue within and between people that can expose boundaries that
shape and constitute different cultural and personal worlds" (4). According to Sarris, it is the
fundamental work of storytelling, of the linguistic and cultural exchange that it prompts, to
bring into view such world-defining boundaries and to call into question the categories that
such boundaries appear to define.
At one point, Sarris recounts the
moment when Mabel McKay interrupts his
unsuccessful attempts to pry information about the Pomo from her, on behalf of his
anthropology professor, to suddenly tell "me this story about the man who poisoned the
beautiful woman doctor" (26). His account of her story puts the words of his aunt and those
of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur together in order to explain how the dialogic elements of
storytelling work to disrupt preconceived assumptions.{22} Suspicious that the
intersubjective dynamic of storytelling (or what, building on Ricoeur, Sarris calls the
"dialogical 'we'" [27]) collapses in writing, he aims to re-present the intersubjectivity of his
exchange with McKay as a way to recover the powerfully challenging effect of her talk,
which "interrupt[s] and simultaneously expose[s] the interlocutor's presuppositions at any
point" (28). Her story about poisoning, moreover, continues to take shape and unfold over
time, as repeated exchanges with and interruptions by his aunt prompt Sarris to forge a series
of personal and historical connections. The complex narrative weaving eventually leads him,
for example, not only to reframe his perceptions of another family, but to interrogate the
limits of ethnography and academic scholarship, and to recognize the pressures that the
history of European imperialism continues to exert on American Indian families and
communities in the present, including his own. Such linguistic exchanges therefore enable "a
simultaneous opening of two worlds" (30) that can generate a powerful site for cultural
critique and for cultural change, including the process of building family and community. As
Mary Slowik aptly describes it, in these exchanges "The frames fall bluntly, cryptically
against each other so that what might seem like an instance of indirection may actually be a
form of narrative and cultural investigation precluding the discursive interpretive modes we
are familiar with" (62). Sarris recognizes that the political possibilities of such interrogation
become especially critical in the liminal, dialogic space between two cultures that is created
and so often exploited by anthropology (KS 32-33).
Mabel McKay's interactions with
others further reveal to Sarris the openness of oral
storytelling that can become foreclosed through writing. Any story contains elements that
exist beyond and outside the story itself. Essie Parrish, the Kashaya Pomo Dreamer and
cousin of Sarris's grandmother, describes the practice of an anthropologist who came to
interview her: "I tell him things, stories. He picks them up like leaves in his machine and
carries them back to his place. Then he listens and looks. Like at each leaf. Beauty is the
whole tree. That's the secret. That's a story. Can this white man know that?" ("Encountering"
126). No story is ever complete or finished, and all stories are part of a limitless and mutable
"context of orality" (127). To treat a story as a leaf, as a category, as a self-contained entity
separate from its larger interwoven context, is to violate its connection to the larger tree that
surrounds and sustains it. Grand Avenue suggests that the political achievement of
a
community's sovereignty can be reached only by restoring and remembering these poisoned
and forgotten connections. {23} The very way we tell
our stories, and the way we
understand genre and literary categories, therefore have political effects.6
The essays collected in Keeping
Slug Woman Alive work both independently and
together to perform the theories of storytelling that they present, in an effort to press writing
more fully to acknowledge and accommodate the transformative possibilities of oral
exchange, including its "tendencies to engage the larger world in which the spoken word lies
so that it is seen for what it might or might not be beyond the page" (45-46). As Sarris
explains, his book "interweaves a myriad of voices with autobiography and theoretical
discourse to create a document representing exchanges that open the world people share
with each other" (6). Woven together in this description are the influences of Mabel McKay's
remarkable orality and of Bakhtinian theories of novelistic language. Those influences also
appear at work in the interweaving of voices and genres within Grand
Avenue.
While it is certainly possible to read
each "chapter" of Grand Avenue on its own, as a
separate and distinct "short story," to do so would be to miss the way in which each story
also alters, reshapes, and furthers the others. Although each story is connected to the others,
the relationship between them obeys neither the principles of a progressive teleology nor of a
coherent unity. In "The Magic Pony," for instance, Jasmine describes her cousin Ruby, with
whom she lives when she decides to move into the home of her Auntie Faye. Jasmine's Ruby
is frustratingly distant, silent, and peculiar. A bookworm, Ruby "talked to extraterrestrials
who landed on the street outside. She'd read books in the library and come out acting like
some character in the book" (4). When Ruby develops an attachment to a foundered pony
slated for slaughter, she unsuccessfully schemes to save it, and finally, Jasmine tells us, gets
arrested after setting the slaughterhouse barn on fire in an effort to save the animal to which
she has become so attached.
Two stories later, Frankie tells of his
youthful attraction to and affection for Ruby. In
contrast to the complex portrait of Ruby's mother offered by Jasmine, Faye appears in
Frankie's account as a bodiless face that resembled a "mask, painted orange lips the same
color as the nails on the door, pencil brows, and false eyelashes, one of the lashes drooping
over her eye like on a busted doll" (63). Readers' prior portrait of Faye gets disrupted,
challenged, and opened up by this new description, told from a new perspective. Like
Jasmine's Ruby, Frankie's Ruby is also interested in constructing and inhabiting fantasy
worlds. But after being rejected by her after kissing her, Frankie unexpectedly discovers
Ruby, in a red dress and "with lipstick and done-up hair" (71), on display {24} among a
group of apparent prostitutes in the slaughterhouse barn. These two accounts of Ruby--a
character who, significantly, never narrates her own story in the book--expose each other's
necessary incompleteness and interdependence. By doing so, they expose the boundaries of
each narrator's personal and cultural world, just as Mabel McKay's verbal exchanges do.
Over and over again throughout Grand Avenue, each narrator's perspective
complicates and
extends previous perceptions of particular characters or events. Each story subtly interrupts
and reshapes the others, compelling readers continuously to rethink their assumptions and to
rebuild the narrative world of this book and the family it describes. Each story adds leaves to
the family's narrative tree, which emerges as inescapably dialogic and intersubjective, and as a
process that always remains unfinished. And the experience of telling such connecting and
competing stories slowly begins to assume a communitist shape necessary to the process of
sovereignty. Consider, for example, Sarris's description of the storytelling origins of the
struggle of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria to regain their illegally terminated
federal recognition:
About a dozen families, at least seventy people, crowded Rita's home [a tribal elder], and someone from each of the families brought a photo album. None of this had been planned. Each family simply wanted to share a family album. Immediately everyone began trading albums and finding relatives--aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, a great-great grandfather--in another family's album. The photos generated stories and memory-- yes, we are all related, connected in some way. ("First" 13)
As Sarris tells it, the Graton Rancheria Indians' profound 2000 legal victory began by sharing
photos and stories and by weaving together the connections that many did not realize already
bound them together.
It is not only the interconnections
between people that are critical to this process of
Native community-building. In his often self-reflective biography of his aunt, Mabel
McKay:
Weaving the Dream, Sarris describes her as the "World-renowned Pomo basketmaker
with
permanent collections in the Smithsonian and countless other museums. The last Dreamer
and sucking doctor among the Pomo peoples. The last living member of the Long Valley
Cache Creek Pomo tribe. The astute interlocutor famous for her uncanny talk that left
people's minds spinning" (MM 3). In this list as in his numerous accounts of Mabel
McKay,
Sarris significantly intertwines her "uncanny talk" with her {25} basketweaving skills and
powers to cure poisoning. As she and other Pomo basketweavers have insisted, it is
impossible to separate such traditions from each other. The basketweaver Susan Billy, for
instance, explains that "as I began to learn about the basket weaving I realized that I couldn't
separate it from learning the traditions and the customs, the religion, all their way of living,
their whole life-style. And I realized that all these things went together, that you couldn't just
learn one part, that they overlapped" (Coe 48). Likewise, Sarris explains that "Mabel cannot
separate a discussion about the material aspect of her basketry from a discussion about
Dreams, doctoring, prophecy, and the ancient basketweaving rules, since for Mabel these
things cannot be talked about or understood separately" (51). Displaying a basket in a
museum showcase makes it categorizable as an "autonomous piece of art" (55)--much like
treating a story as a leaf does--but at the price of severing its crucial connectedness to the
very context that gives it both cultural meaning and political power.7
In his work, Sarris continuously
foregrounds the difficulty of maintaining this complex
oral contextuality in written form. At one point while trying to record her autobiography,
Sarris complains to McKay that her "stories go all over the place. I can't write them like that.
It's too hard for people to follow" (4). He asks her to provide more narrative continuity,
something like a "theme . . . that connects all the dots, ties up all the stories." Mabel replies
with both amusement and defiance. "That's funny," she remarks. "Tying up all the stories.
Why somebody want to do that?" before instructing him to forget about "somebody else's
rule. You just do the best way you know how. What you know from me" (5). This exchange
between Sarris and McKay, in which she verbally resists compliance with the terms of his
request for more recognizable and separable categories, resembles those between McKay and
the students, anthropologists, and scholars who ask her to explain how she learned to make
baskets or to doctor the sick. When asked by a student at an interview on native healing
techniques how to treat poison oak, for example, she replies "Calamine lotion" (KS
17). A
doctoral student studying Shakespeare listens to her story about a black snake that suddenly
appears in a vase in the home of a woman whose husband repeatedly threatens to kill it.
When the student asks whether the snake was killed, Mabel explains that "There's laws
against killing people" (37). Perplexed, the student asks "was it man or snake? I mean when
you were looking at it?" Mabel's reply--"You got funny ideas. Aren't I sitting here?"
(37)--effectively exposes and challenges her interrogator's most basic categories and the
assumptions that depend on {26} them. A Stanford
showing of a documentary film about
Essie Parrish and the Bole Maru attended by members of Sarris's family generated similar
effects.8 During the question and answer period about Parrish and the film, a
woman in the
audience tells Violet Chappell, Parrish's daughter, and Anita Silva, a Kashaya Pomo
politician, that "I don't know anything about the Indians. I was hoping to know something
after today. Like where to start." Silva responds by asking the woman "do you know who
you are? Why are you interested? Ask yourself that" (74).
Exchanges such as these confuse
listeners precisely because they befuddle the
categories of experience, culture, and response that their questioners presume and expect.
When Sarris informs Mabel McKay that in order to complete her biography he will still need
to get from her "the exact dates and figures that go with the stories" (135), so that "I can get
things right. I mean with your life, the story" (136), she announces that "It has nothing to do
with dates and that. I don't know about dates. It's everlasting what I'm talking about" (136).
It is precisely the unexpected interruptions, disruptions, and withholdings in Mabel's verbal
exchanges that expose for Sarris the most important and dynamic elements of storytelling's
dialogic character: its intersubjectivity, its open and unfinished quality, its self-reflexive
capacity to reveal cultural boundaries and the powerful political possibilities that reside in the
often murky connections between categories and people. Grand Avenue is in many
ways a
textual performance of the kinds of verbal strategies employed by a speaker like Mabel
McKay. And the central figure in this "novel in stories" for such a dynamics is the basket,
which represents the power and the limits both of stories and of family.
* * *
Pomo Indian baskets,
acknowledged by many to be the most famous baskets in the
world, are made from willow rods, around which are twined or coiled strands that come from
three different sources: sedge root, bullrush root, and redbud shoots.9 These three
materials
yield the three different colors that make up traditional Pomo basketry: white sedge, black
bullrush, and reddish-brown redbud.10 These materials must be located, gathered,
and
prepared, before their strands are ready to be woven together into a variety of traditional,
and sometimes more original, designs. Pomo baskets vary widely in size and shape as well,
depending largely on whether their function is carrying and gathering, storage, winnowing
and leaching acorn meal, trapping animals, or cooking food. When they are used as gifts or
prayer baskets, they can be {27} as small as a thimble
and are often adorned with colorful
feathers and shell beads.11 As Sarris explains in
his biography of Mabel McKay, baskets
served a crucial role in her doctoring. The spirit explains to her that "You make a basket to
spit out the sickness you suck with your mouth" (MM 73), and when Mabel sucks
the "tiny
spotted fish" from an ill Colusa woman she "cough[s] it out into the basket" (94). The spirit
furthermore informs her that "Each of your baskets has a purpose. Each has a rule. But a lot
of people won't understand that. You must explain, show the people that the baskets are
living, not just pretty things to look at" (74). Each basket therefore marks a node within a
complex web of personal, familial, and communal interconnections, just as each basket is
constructed out of a complex and interconnected weave. Like a story, a basket takes on its
shape, meaning and function only within this category-defying contextuality. But the basket's
weave is itself often interrupted and disrupted, just as stories and genealogies are. Grand
Avenue suggests that those interruptions within traditions, patterns, and structures are
themselves spiritual sites for renewal and communitist healing.
"Sam Toms's Last Song," the only
story in Grand Avenue that is not a first-person
narrative, seems itself a kind of interruption within the book's pattern or structure. In the
story, Nellie is at home finishing two baskets, "a small canoe-shaped basket" (GA
153) that
has been commissioned of her by the mayor and a "half-finished beaded basket" (154) that
has been ordered from her by a local woman. As she weaves the final loops of sedge on the
canoe basket, Sam Toms arrives at her door, determined on his 100th birthday to
escape his
dependence on other family members by moving in with her, perhaps even marrying her.
Nellie asks him what he has to offer in return, and when his money is not enough he
determines to convince her by singing his own powerful songs to her. But as he does so,
Nellie "hold[s] her basket toward him" (158), capturing his songs and his power within it; she
exclaims afterwards that "in the right hands your songs can be used as medicine. Antidotes"
(158). Baskets, like storytelling, have the power to extract poison, to contain it, and to
transform its function from disease to cure.12 Grand Avenue works
like a basket to the extent
that it, too, seeks to extract the poisons of fear and anger that separate the members of this
family and community from each other, and to transform those poisons through an
interwoven story into a medicine with the political and spiritual power of restoration.
This story is clearly a significant one
in the collection, since Nellie's capture of Sam
Toms's songs marks a turning point in the harmful {28}
effects of poison on the family. But
it is also an anomalous story, the only story told by an omniscient narrator, the only story not
owned and spoken in the first person, by a particular voice. If we understand Grand
Avenue
as a Pomo basket, however, what might appear anomalous or even erroneous becomes
deliberate and crucial. In the book and catalog for a 1986 exhibition on Native American art,
organized by the American Federation of Arts, the photograph of a basket woven by Ukiah
Pomo Susan Billy appears. The basket consists of sedge and redbud woven around willow
rod, in a pattern of staggered dark rectangles that spiral within a light-colored weave. But
within one of those dark rectangles appear three or four small coils of light sedge that form a
very small square. The catalog obliquely explains that "The lighter accents inserted into the
dark oblong designs (the meanings of which are now lost) allow a weaver to continue work
despite a menstrual taboo" (Coe 231-32). In another catalog, a design band that runs through
one Pomo basket suddenly breaks into a different design motif before returning to its original
pattern, an anomaly described as a "dau" or "a break in the pattern," which, although "not
entirely understood, . . . often has been interpreted as a place where the spirit could come
and go, to enter and inspect the basket or escape when the basket is destroyed" (Bibby
45).13
An account of "The Myth of the Dau," collected by S.A. Barrett in Pomo Myths,
suggests
another kind of significance to this sudden discrepancy within the pattern.
When the world-maker, the coyote spirit, had concluded his work of creating the world and man, he seated himself to rest, congratulating himself upon the many good works he had done. At this juncture the Pika Namo, or basket spirits, came before him and petitioned him to give them a village or home to be theirs always. The coyote spirit graciously acceded, and said to them, that there, on the surface of baskets, they might have a home which should be theirs always, and then addressing the basket spirits, said, "You basket spirits, young men and young women, old men and old women, children all, here is a good home for you all, to be yours always. If you die, you will lie in the ground four days here, then you will ascend to the upper sky to live forever, where there is no sickness, where it is always day, where all are happy.
"The door (dau) of the basket will always keep swinging for you to escape through when you die." (Barrett 380)
{29} Paula Giese explains further that Billy's basket
reveals a "dau (weaver's choice of
deliberate apparent error), the Spirit Door that lets good spirits in, and lets bad ones out, of
the basket" ("California").14 What might appear therefore as an inadvertent
mistake in the
basket's weave is instead a home for the basket spirits, and an opening through which the
basket spirits can move. The story "Sam Toms's Last Song," I suggest, might also be
understood as a dau, a kind of spirit door within the basket-text of Grand
Avenue. While it
seems a discrepancy in the pattern of the narrative, it subtly marks a site within it where
spirits transport themselves, from their residence in Sam Toms to a new "home" in Nellie's
canoe-shaped basket. Likewise, it is repeatedly and only through the transfer or sharing of
song and story--across what appear to be discontinuites--that it becomes possible to imagine
or create a communitist sense of "home" for the collection of largely disconnected Native
individuals who make up Grand Avenue.
Later, for example, when Nellie
watches in amazement as the young girl Alice weaves a
perfect knot from sedge on her first try, she insists that Alice speak to her as she learns to
make baskets. Storytelling and weaving are integrated functions, as Nellie realizes when she
asks Alice to "Talk. It's important to talk. Us Indians here are all family. That's the trouble,
no one talks. Stories, the true stories, that's what we need to hear. We got to get it out. The
true stories can help us. Old-time people, they told stories, Alice. They talked. Talk, Alice,
don't be like the rest" (219). Alice grasps rods of willow for her basket as she begins to tell
Nellie the story of the strands that make up her family and of the many races and ethnicities
that tie them together. Alice explains that her sister Justine's father, for example, "is a Filipino
and mine is Mexican. My brother Sheldon's is white. And my other brother, Jeffrey, is a
Indian from Stewart Point. Justine gets in lots of trouble. Her and Mom fight. Justine likes
black boys. Mom hates black people" (220). Only when discontinuity, disruption, and
mixture are recognized as a viable part of the pattern can family and tribal history be
remembered. Moreover, discrepancy and difference themselves make up part of the "home"
of this Native community.
Just as basketweaving, storytelling,
and family are tightly and inseparably interwoven in
this exchange between Nellie and Alice, so are they throughout Grand Avenue. Just
as
multiple willow rods make up the shape and foundation of a Pomo basket, so do the {30}
multiple but separate stories of individuals mark the contours of the family's larger story. Just
as white sedge, black bullrush, and reddish-brown redbud weave patterns in and around the
willow to give the basket its design, so do the intermixed races of Indian, African, Mexican,
Filipino, and European give design to the extended family of Sam Toms. Races and
ethnicities form a complex pattern here, just as the red, black, and white strands do in a
Pomo basket, and as the multiple stories do in the book Grand Avenue. These
interdependent
stories function as roots and rods that-- like the sedge and willow that Nellie
collects--intertwine narratively to weave a book that resembles a textual version of the Pomo
baskets that are the subject of so much of Sarris's work, and that emerge here at the end of
Grand Avenue as a powerful figure for the intercultural polyvocality that defines
family,
tradition, and story. That basket and its interconnected weave only take shape, however, as
the family members --by opening the door or dau--overcome the shame that
prevents them
from talking, from telling stories, from healing, and from creating a sovereign home.
When Anna falls in love as a young
girl with Joaquin Jones, she is warned by her mother
that "That boy's your third cousin." Anna complains in response that "We're tangled up with
everybody" (38), an observation that her mother confirms. Through its own entangled
stories, Grand Avenue slowly exposes this interwovenness, and ceremonially
transforms it
from a form of shame to one of strength. Frankie, who falls for Ruby Jones in the subsequent
story, also finally figures that "me and Ruby was related somehow too. Hell, all of us is
related" (61). If Sam Toms is "grandpa of half the neighborhood" (61), as Frankie remarks,
then his "offspring," notes Toms himself, consist of "Mexicans, Filipinos, whites" (144). The
community living at Grand Avenue is bound together by these ties that have been hidden or
silenced as a result of a historical and ongoing colonialism. As Sarris remarks in his
reflections on the ancestors of the present-day Graton Rancheria Indians, "Fear, then, no
doubt, was ubiquitous. For fear is a by-product of separation and estrangement; and
colonization deliberately works to separate the subjugated from everything they know:
culture, land, one another. . . . Imagine not knowing your own family, or fearing your own
home" (13).
Albert fearfully reflects on the pattern
of his family when, upon learning that his mother
was black, he insists in response that he is Portuguese. He later questions such categories
altogether when he realizes that "a Portuguese could be a black person: you know, mixing
with the Moors and all. Or how a black person could be a Portuguese, mixing with a
Portuguese. It could happen either way or both. I'd never know in our case, since there was
no one to ask" (111). This leaf or strand of his family's story represents a kind of
dau or
confusion in the {31} pattern, one that changes the
meaning of many other stories for Albert,
who now comes to see his own attraction to a sixteen-year-old girl he has picked up from the
street as "my particular version of what plagued everyone in my family, my shame" (112). As
he drives by his own house, he imagines "A bunch of Indians in there. In my house, yes. Not
just my wife and children and my wife's mother. It doesn't stop there. It goes on" (115).
Indeed, it goes on, Albert realizes, to include the young woman with whom he is driving,
who calls him "Unky" and who is probably a "relative of some kind" who "knew who I was"
(116).
The effect of imposing bounded and
separated racial categories onto the family--like the
effect of distinct categories on the process of storytelling or basketweaving--is to shame into
silence the complex weave of seemingly disorderly connections that bind people, stories, and
baskets together and give them meaning. As a young man, Steven is instructed not to marry
his pregnant girlfriend, Pauline, when he is informed with great "embarrassment" that
"Pauline's your sister" (191). Steven is again "ashamed" (196) when, much later in life, he
unexpectedly encounters Pauline at an Indian festival, and it is this same shame that leads him
to keep silent to his wife, Reyna, about Pauline and her boy, Tony, whom Steven knows is
his son. Only by telling the story of Pauline and Tony to Reyna are these strands of the story
integrated into the family basket, and only then can that basket reclaim its power to heal and
its potential to rebuild a sense of home. As Sarris remarks elsewhere, "Fear and separation,
the ghosts of colonialism, haunt us and we must forever be on the lookout for them. But we
have the antidote. We carry that with us too: hope. And the good medicine that empowers
hope, enables us to succeed: the family that is a tribe, and the good stories that remind us of
that" ("First" 14).
In the process of collecting stories in
order to write his biography of Mabel McKay,
Greg Sarris discovered that "Things came together. It wasn't just her story she had wanted
me to know. While trying to help her, while trying to trace her story, I traced my own"
(164). He unexpectedly learns that he is related to many of the Pomo Indians among whom
he had been living for years, and finally reflects on the shape that these intertwined stories
have taken: "Her story, the story, our story. Like the tiny basket in my shirt pocket, different
threads, sedge and redbud, woven over one willow rod into a design that went round and
round, endless" (164-65).
The stories told in Grand
Avenue repeatedly reveal not only the intermixing but the
interwovenness that members of the family have tried to conceal. As Albert astutely remarks,
"Everybody's connected to {32} everybody" (115). And
it is those connections and patterns
that the seemingly separate and disparate stories of Grand Avenue weave together
into a
family basket. As the Ukiah Pomo basketweaver Susan Billy remarks, "Among our people,
both men and women were basketmakers. Everything in our lifestyle was connected to those
baskets. Our lives were bound the way baskets were bound together" (Giese,
Pomo). At the
novel's end, Alice is still telling her stories to Nellie and is still weaving the basket with the
sunflower pattern. Grand Avenue, too, is a story and a basket that is finally left
open,
unfinished, as Mabel McKay insists all stories are, and as perhaps all categories should be if
they are to achieve the political goal of transforming colonialist poisons into the healing
space of home.
NOTES
For their enormously helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article, I wish to thank Juan Velasco, Malea Powell and the anonymous readers for SAIL.
1In the parenthetical citations in this article, I use the following abbreviations to refer to Sarris's books: Grand Avenue (GA), Keeping Slug Woman Alive (KS), Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream (MM).
2 Pomo bear people were doctors who "possessed a special set of magical religious paraphernalia (a bear costume being the prime object) with which they were able to acquire special and extraordinary powers of movement, poisoning, and curing" (Bean and Theodoratus 294). For a more specific account of Juana Maria, see "Juana Maria."
3 Rainwater considers Native novels by Linda Hogan, M. Scott Momaday, and others outside of Western generic terms and instead as "medicine bundles" or "tribal twins."
4 In fact, the only scholarly treatment of Sarris's fiction is Hardin's very brief and limited analysis of Grand Avenue, which suggests that the book "repeat[s] some of García Márquez's motifs and themes" (5). Hardin's narrowly-focused treatment of Grand Avenue unfortunately neglects altogether the Native American contexts and traditions that inform Sarris's work.
{33}
5 Warrior has criticized Sarris for neglecting to include Native critics in
Keeping Slug Woman
Alive (xix), although in doing so Warrior overlooks the powerful critical and theoretical
presence of Mabel McKay. Despite the fact that his writings are less explicit on such matters,
Sarris's writing and political activity indicate that he shares both Warrior's concern for Native
self-determination and sovereignty, and his belief that the struggle to achieve them involves
recognizing that "the presence of traditions does not in and of itself make the future. Rather,
those traditions make the future a possibility, just as they did for the people with whom the
tradition originated" (Warrior 106).
6 See Craig Womack for a powerful argument about the consequences of neglecting the politics of Native literary aesthetics (esp. 52-67), including his critique of oral story collections that violate tribal and political contexts by privileging the thematic or "factual" or "traditional" content of native stories. Sarris's own writing, including his accounts of the dialogues between Mabel McKay and others, likewise highlights the often-obscured politics of verbal exchange, and Sarris's own integrative structure and style often work to recover the political dimensions of native storytelling so often eliminated by the imposition of Western literary categories.
7 In her poem-appeal, Linda Yamane represents the problem of museums and basketweaving:
We've got this problem of
conflicting
cultural perspective-
one that feels protective
measures
preserve these basket treasures.
The other believes that
separation
from the people has been
too long
and like a song no longer sung
a basket un-touched
and un-used
will die-
its spirit will be gone. (7)
8 For more on the Bole Maru, a syncretic religious system that integrated indigenous and Christian forms, see Bean and Vane.
{34}
9 See Allen 17-21.
10 Bullrush is a brownish root that is dyed black by soaking it in a mixture of black walnuts, rusty metal, ash, and rainwater. See Allen 20. For more on the incredibly complex and laborious process of gathering, preparing, designing and weaving basket materials, see Newman 7-22, McLendon and Holland 118-125, and Bibby.
11 See Elgasser and Barrett "Basket."
12 Poison is a political, cultural, and medical source of worry of another kind for contemporary Native California basketweavers, who find that their traditional sources for basket materials are very often contaminated by the use of herbicides by the Forest Service and pesticides by farmers. The California Indian Basketweavers Association (CIBA), formed in 1992 to help preserve and promote basketweaving traditions, has been very active in challenging the use of such poisons, as well as in challenging access to traditional sources on private property. For more on these issues, as well as profiles of individual basketweavers, see Roots and Shoots, the newsletter of CIBA, and the Ortiz and "Western" articles in News from Native California.
13 See also McLendon and Holland, who, citing the work of J.W. Hudson and Carl Purdy, likewise suggest that the "dau" or "door" either "allows a spirit to enter the basket and inspect the work" or allows the spirit to escape in the event of the basket's destruction (115).
14 I take this quotation from one of Giese's carefully documented and informative web pages linked through "Native American Indian: Art, Culture, Education, History, Science." The detailed information Giese provides on Pomo basketry and the Pomo basketweavers Elsie Allen and Susan Billy are especially useful.
WORKS CITED
Allen, Elsie. Pomo Basketmaking: A Supreme Art for the Weaver. Ed. Vinson Brown. Healdsburg, CA: Naturegraph, 1972.
Barrett, S. A. "Basket Design of the Pomo Indians." Seven Early Accounts of the Pomo Indians and their Culture. Ed. Robert F. Heizer. Berkeley: Archaeological Research Facility, 1975. 29-35.
{35}
--, ed. Pomo Myths. Bulletin of the Public Museum of the City of
Milwaukee 15 (Nov. 6,
1933): 1-608.
Bean, Lowell John and Dorothea Theodoratus. "Western Pomo and Northeastern Pomo." Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 8. California. Ed. Robert F. Heizer. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. 289-305.
Bean, Lowell John and Sylvia Brakke Vane. "Cults and Their Transformations." Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 8. California. Ed. Robert F. Heizer. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. 662-672.
Bibby, Brian. The Fine Art of California Indian Basketry. Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum in assoc. with Heydey Books, 1996.
Coe, Ralph T. Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art 1965-1985. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1986.
Elgasser, Albert B. "Basketry." Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 8. California. Ed. Robert F. Heizer. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. 626-641.
Giese, Paula. California Basketry Plants, 1. 21 March 1997. 18 June 2001. <http.//www.kstrom.net/isk/art/basket/bascalif.html>.
--. Native American Indian: Art, Culture, Education, History, Science. 21 March 1997. 18 June 2001. <http://www.kstrom.net/isk/index. html>.
--. Pomo People: Brief History. 21 March 1997. 18 June 2001. <http://www.kstrom.net/isk/art/basket/pomohist.html>.
Hardin, Michael. "Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue: Variations on Three Themes in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude." Notes on Contemporary Literature 29.4 (1999): 5-7.
"Juana Maria." News from Native California 8.4 (1995): 28.
McLendon, Sally and Brenda Shears Holland. "The Basketmaker: The Pomoans of California." The Ancestors: Native Artisans of the Americas. New York: Museum of the American Indian, 1979. 103-129.
Newman, Sandra Corrie. Indian Basket Weaving: How to Weave Pomo, Yurok, Pima and Navajo Baskets. Flagstaff: Northland P, 1974.
Ortiz, Beverly R. "Pesticides and Basketry." News from Native California 7.3 (1993): 7-10.
Rainwater, Catherine. Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction. Philadephia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.
Roots and Shoots. Newsletter of CIBA. 31 May 2002. <http://www. ciba.org/>.
{36}
Ruppert, James. Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction. Norman: U
of
Oklahoma P, 1995.
Sarris, Greg. "Encountering the Native Dialogue: Critical Theory and American Indian Oral Literatures." College Literature 18.3 (1991): 126-31.
--. "First Thoughts on Restoration: Notes from a Tribal Chairman." News from Native California 14.3 (2001): 12-15.
--. Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories. New York: Penguin, 1994.
--. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
--. Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Slowik, Mary. "'More to the Story': Ethnography and Narrative Form in Greg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive and Keith Basso's 'Stalking with Stories.'" North Dakota Quarterly 64.2 (1997): 49-65.
Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.
Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
"Western Regional Indigenous Basketweavers Gathering, June 17-20, 1999: A Special Report from News from Native California." News from Native California 13.1 (1999): 21-44.
Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
Yamane, Linda. "Baskets in Museum Collections: A California Indian Perspective." News from Native California 5.4 (1991): 7.
Michelle Burnham is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University. She is the author of Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature and has edited the recently republished 1767 novel The Female American.
{37}
Son of Two Bloods. Vincent L. Mendoza. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. ISBN: 0803282575. 200 pages.
A Hundred Miles of Bad Road: An Armored Cavalryman in Vietnam, 1967-68. Dwight W. Birdwell and Keith William Nolan. Novato, Calif: Presidio Press, 2000. ISBN: 0891417125. 256 pages.
Year in NAM: A Native American Soldier's Story. Leroy TeCube. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. ISBN: 0803294433. 268 pages.
Indians in Indian Country
Scott Andrews
While putting together a course
on literature of the Vietnam War, I wanted my reading
list to reflect the variety of experiences that made up that intriguing and troubling war. That
is, I wanted my students to see the war from a variety of perspectives that were shaped by
the ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender of those who lived through the war and its
aftermath. With that in mind, I wanted to include an autobiography of an American Indian
veteran, and I hoped the autobiography would illustrate some of the general conclusions of
Tom Holm's book on the American Indian experience in Vietnam, Strong Hearts,
Wounded
Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War.
Among the observations Holm makes
is that American Indians often joined the U.S.
military for reasons other than those commonly assumed by federal and military officials.
U.S. officials commonly assumed that American Indians joined the military out of a desire for
assimilation with the American mainstream. Certainly this was true for some, perhaps even
many, American Indian veterans. Others joined not necessarily for assimilation itself but for
the improved economic and social status that mainstream participation could make possible.
However, most of the veterans discussed in Holm's book "listed tribal and/or family
traditions as having a significant impact to enlist or accept conscription in the armed forces.
They seemed to be taking their cues not from the larger society but from their own social and
cultural environments" (19).
In other words, the U.S. military,
which had long been part of the larger U.S. effort to
either stamp out or dilute Indian cultures, had become a method by which those cultures
could continue themselves. Service in the U.S. military did not mean a rejection of tribal
culture and values; ritual and communal qualities of tribal warfare--personal bravery, sacrifice
for the group, etc.--had been taken from tribal cultures {38} with the end of inter-tribal
warfare and military resistance to the U.S. government, so tribal cultures replaced old forms
of war with new forms: service in the U.S. military. Such motivations, Holm states, led
American Indian men to participate in the Vietnam War (and other wars) at rates greater than
their portion of the national population.
Holm also suggests tribal and family
traditions led the American Indian veterans he
surveyed to seek combat action rather than simple service in the military. Many of the
veterans he discusses volunteered for combat units and dangerous assignments, and nearly a
third of his subjects were wounded in action (20). Many of these veterans sought combat
assignments in order to be "a warrior in a tribal sense, with all the responsibilities,
relationships, and rituals that go along with that status" (21). These veterans often returned
home to tribal communities with a new status, one of honor and respect, an experience very
different from the receptions of many non-Indian Americans and of those Indians who did
not have a tribal community to call home.
So, as I looked for autobiographies of
American Indian veterans of the Vietnam War, I
was looking for descriptions of a life that was at least partially shaped by tribal cultures and
traditions. I was looking for a life that could be readily distinguished from the lives of other
veterans-- white, black, Latino, etc. I found three recent autobiographies, which, fortunately,
have been reissued in paperback, but I found two of them much better suited for my
purposes than the third. Although Son of Two Bloods by Vincent Mendoza
includes his
experiences in Vietnam during the war, his discussion of the war is limited to two chapters. I
will discuss Mendoza's book briefly, but I will concentrate my comments on two books that
most closely support Holm's: A Hundred Miles of Bad Road: An Armored Cavalryman in
Vietnam, 1967-68 by Dwight Birdwell and Year in NAM: A Native American
Soldier's Story
by Leroy TeCube. I hope my comments here will bring some attention to these books, which
were little reviewed, especially in the academic press. I also hope my comments will prove
useful for those who are interested in the American Indian experience in the Vietnam War, a
topic that is getting increasing attention, as books by Holm and others indicate. These are
exemplary American stories, exemplary in that they are diverse and in that they are stories of
amalgamation, of mixed bloods and cultures. They are stories of resistance and patriotism, of
pride and ambivalence.
The jacket art of Son of Two
Bloods is a picture of Mendoza in his Marine uniform, but
the book tells the story of his life, not just his military life--only two chapters are devoted to
his time in the military. In a chapter titled "Special Delivery Marine" Mendoza recounts his
{39} enlistment, his basic training, and his first year in
the service, which is spent on
Okinawa with the Marine's mail services. Although he discusses some encounters with racial
prejudice in the military, his Creek/Mexican identity seems to have little impact on his time in
the service. In a chapter titled "The Warrior Within" Mendoza describes his time in Vietnam;
he volunteers to serve there after his first year in Okinawa. He is still delivering mail, but he
sees some combat during the Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese. Despite the chapter's
title, Mendoza does not refer to a particular warrior tradition among the Creek. Instead, he
seems to refer to a warrior instinct: "When I did get shot at and saw my buddies fall, I grew
angry, the warrior within erupted" (101). He does not describe firefights in detail, but he
does say "the acrid smell of gunpowder invigorat[ed] my adrenalin" (101). One irony of his
Vietnam War experience is that Mendoza does not refer to a particular American Indian
warrior tradition as informing his battle experience or morale, but a white comrade does. A
fellow soldier gives Mendoza the nickname of Mangus, "short for Mangus Coloradas, the
famed Apache warrior" (101).
Revenge is Mendoza's stated
motivation for joining the Marines, not fulfilling the role of
Indian warrior. It is possible that his sense of revenge comes from Creek traditions, but
Mendoza does not explain it in this way, though he does refer to carrying "the blood of
warriors and 'La Raza'" (94). So as the plane carrying him home rises above the Vietnamese
landscape, he recalls his high school buddy who died there: "I got 'em Wayne . . . it's done.
Now it's my life, Wayne, but I won't ever forget you" (105).
The combat action missing from
Mendoza's memoir can be found in abundance in
Birdwell's A Hundred Miles of Bad Road. Not far into his book the reader
encounters an
ambush by North Vietnamese troops. The ambush wipes out the lead platoon of the armored
column, and Birdwell holds off the attacking forces almost single-handedly, directing the fire
of his tank's large cannon while firing the machine gun atop the turret-exposed the entire time
to enemy fire. Birdwell, who received two Silver Crosses for his bravery and a Purple Heart,
describes each major encounter with the North Vietnamese, and his descriptions are
supplemented by his co-author, Keith William Nolan, who has written several books on the
Vietnam War.
Birdwell's memoir is devoted to the
combat action he saw in Vietnam, but race, class
and politics are frequently discussed. He discusses the ways American mistreated the
Vietnamese; the tension among draftees, volunteers, and career soldiers; the tension between
{40} white soldiers and soldiers of color; the assumed
allegiance between black soldiers and
Indian soldiers; and the similarities between the Vietnamese and American Indians, who both
were targets of U.S. oppression, prejudice, and military force.
While Mendoza goes to Vietnam to
seek revenge for his friend who died there, Birdwell
joins the Army to escape the poverty of his childhood and the prejudice of his hometown that
would have kept him confined to his lower-class status. He was the son of a mixed-blood
Cherokee father and a white mother, but he spent little of his youth with his father. Instead,
he spent more time with his mother and white step-father, but they lived among the
Cherokees in eastern Oklahoma. Birdwell and his mother made much-needed money by
joining "the poorest of the Cherokee-who were their closest friends--picking strawberries in
the spring and beans in the summer and fall" (xvii). His parents were resigned to their
poverty, but Birdwell sought to escape it, and the Army presented his best opportunity. He
also wanted to escape the prejudice he had encountered in the small community. He was less
than half Cherokee, but he resembled a full-blood. He suggests racial prejudice convinced his
high school counselors to push him toward jobs in manual labor despite his high scores in
class. The prejudice he faced from others was more blunt; he was told by "some of the
rednecks" in town that he would end up "drunk, dead, or in prison like the rest" of the
Cherokees (xix).
Birdwell internalized some of this
subtle and not-so-subtle belittling, as he started
drinking heavily in high school, hanging out with a group of "badass" Cherokee boys and
drinking in taverns with fake IDs. This led to trouble in the family, fights with his step-father
and accusations from his mother that he was acting like his natural father, whom Birdwell
describes as a notorious drunk. His father was frequently jailed for his misbehavior and was
seen by many when he had passed out on the side of the road. Birdwell says, "It was a
constant fear of mine that I would end up an alcoholic like my natural father" (xx). These
internalized fears and doubts influence his military service. His high scores on aptitude tests
in the Army led to his selection for U.S. Military Academy prep school, but he turned down
the chance to attend West Point "partly out of self-doubt" (6).
Birdwell volunteers for duty in
Vietnam, and his desire for combat is motivated in part
by his Cherokee heritage. He goes to Vietnam because he "wanted to do my ancestors
proud" (3), but he does not elaborate on this motivation. If he had a particularly Cherokee
warrior tradition in mind, he does not describe it. However, Birdwell does {41} elaborate on
his other motivations for going to Vietnam, and he illustrates the intriguing synthesis of
American patriotism and native resistance that so often defines the twentieth century
American Indian experience. When he first arrives in Vietnam, he is a believer in the
American cause: saving the world from communist aggression. He says, "I was there because
in my mind America was right. . . . I wanted to nail that coonskin to the wall for LBJ" (3).
Birdwell calls himself a "Superhawk" at one point, but despite his gung-ho nature for the war
he does not demonize the enemy. He says, "They didn't have horns; they didn't have tails. . . .
I imagined them to be energetic and dedicated to their cause just like me, and I felt sorry for
them more than anything else." The North Vietnamese soldiers were "poor misguided souls .
. . fighting for the wrong banner" (14).
Birdwell believes in American
exceptionalism, which constructs his nation as the leader
of the free world, an example and a guardian for others; but this exceptionalism has led to the
arrogance that fueled the oppression of American Indians. The belief in the moral superiority
of Euro-Americans allowed them to rationalize their mistreatment of other human beings.
Birdwell believes in an American superiority, but he does not use it to dismiss others as
unworthy of respect or dignity. He believes in the superiority of the American cause, but he
also is aware of his nation's past sins against his Indian ancestors, and he is determined to
avoid repeating them. He recalls the mistreatment of Vietnamese civilians by American
soldiers, including at least one incident when he draws a pistol on a U.S. soldier to stop his
abuse of civilians. Birdwell writes of his internal conflicts as the war progressed, as he
struggles to maintain a belief in the original goal of the war while being disgusted at what the
war had become:
I still wanted to believe in the war--these so-called gooks were the people we were fighting for!--and blended in with all that was the thought of old cruelties inflicted upon the American Indians at the hands of the U.S. Army. Being of Cherokee heritage, I didn't want to turn around three or four generations later and perpetuate the same sort of abuse myself, especially with people who were poor farmers just like my people were poor farmers, and who in some cases looked almost exactly like the Indians I knew back in Oklahoma. (139)
{42}
Birdwell is sensitive also to how race
relations influence life within the Army. He notes
that tension existed between whites and blacks in uniform, but that for the black soldiers
there was "strength in numbers." Black men served in large enough numbers to make
harassment by white soldiers unwise or unhealthy; therefore, "the white guys tended to walk
softly around the sensibilities of the black guys" (124). Indians, however, were not there in
enough numbers to provide protection and they "had to put up with a certain amount of grief
about our Indian blood" (124). Most of it was fairly innocent, he writes, but he does tell of
one sergeant who rode him with constant remarks about "firewater" and "redskins." (125).
Birdwell's experiences illustrate the
white/non-white polarization in society at the
time--in the military overseas and in the United States. Birdwell apparently got along well
with the black soldiers, and he tells of interrupting a "Black Power meeting" in Korea before
he arrived in Vietnam. Hunting for a warm tent in the winter, he enters a large tent and
stumbled upon a group of thirty black soldiers from his tank unit. "They were in the middle
of animated discussion, but they stopped as soon as they saw me and stared with stony
faces." Finally the leader speaks, to Birdwell's relief: "Aw, hell, that's Dwight Birdwell. He's a
fuckin' Indian. He's one of us" (126).
Of these three autobiographies, the
most traditional Indian perspective on the war is
provided by Leroy TeCube's Year in NAM: A Native American Soldier's Story.
While
Birdwell's pre-war identity as a Cherokee seems to be derived from a sense of poverty and
the prejudice experienced by the Cherokee, Leroy TeCube's Jicarilla Apache identity is
derived from shared religious and cultural practices. That is, for Birdwell, race seems to be
defined largely by class; for TeCube it is defined primarily by culture.
Although TeCube does not discuss
possible tribal motivations for joining the
military--in fact, he was drafted by the Army before he could enlist in the Marines--his
Apache identity shapes his experience in Vietnam, and it comes into sharper definition for
him there. In a real sense, TeCube's success (and survival) in Vietnam was due to his Jicarilla
Apache childhood: he attributes much of his success in guiding his unit through the Vietnam
countryside to the years he spent as a young man playing outdoors with his Apache friends.
The games he played outdoors taught him and his young friends many things that became
quite valuable in Vietnam: "the art of concealment (day or night), how to encroach without
being seen, how to recognize various terrain features (especially at night), and how to follow
orders without hesitation" (xiv). {43} The respect he was
taught to have for elders translated
easily into a respect for the chain of command: "We grew up full of discipline in our lives and
understood the reason for it" (xiv).
TeCube attributes his survival of
several close calls with land mines to the prayers he
knew were being said for him back home. In letters from friends he was told of special
dances and prayers being said for the soldiers in Vietnam, and his appreciation for the ties
with his family and community increases:
Perhaps it was the dangerous surroundings that made me understand things I never would have otherwise. At times I could sense what was happening on the other side of the world. I knew my people and other tribes were concerned for our welfare. We were on their minds. Knowing this, I conducted myself with more confidence. (72)
Combat also teaches TeCube an appreciation for his own participation in this community
knit
together with prayer. He says, "There in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia, I learned to
pray." He had always been aware of prayer, he says, but he had not done it sincerely until he
was thrown into combat halfway around the world. On that night, alone and afraid, he prays
in his "traditional way." His prayer concludes with concern for how his experiences can
benefit his community: "I pray that whatever comes out of this place becomes a positive one
to guide our lives with" (40).
Probably all soldiers feel profoundly
alone in combat, but most likely none are alone in
spirit--they have family and friends (a whole nation) concerned for them. TeCube often
reminds us of the community behind the soldier as he recalls conversations with medicine
men and Apache veterans of other wars. Their prayers and advice not only aid him in
Vietnam but further imbed him in a community and encourage him to conduct himself in a
way that will make his community proud. Unlike Mendoza and Birdwell, TeCube seems
aware of a particular warrior tradition that he carries with him in Vietnam. He does not
elaborate on that tradition in historical detail, but the reader can see how it shapes his
experiences in Vietnam.
For instance, TeCube does not
participate with his fellow soldiers in collecting
souvenirs from their killed enemies. He cites Apache tradition in avoiding contact with the
dead when he refrains from gathering North Vietnamese weapons and paraphernalia: "Once a
person is gone from this world he will work against the living" (73).
{44}
TeCube recounts combat situations
that remind him of particular moments in his
Apache upbringing. In one instance, he must run across an exposed bridge as the enemy fires
on his unit. As bullets fly past him, he recalls an arduous, annual relay race between two clans
back home. The clan elders painted and blessed the runners and the track. TeCube recalls
that during the race, which could last several hours, the older men "holding aspen branches
[gave] you words of encouragement and [whipped] you on the legs with the branches for
added strength" (89). On the bridge, his strength begins to flag beneath the weight of his field
pack, but he recalls the encouragement of the elders and he feels renewed, reaching the
opposite shore safely.
An interesting difference between
TeCube's understanding of his behavior in combat
and Mendoza's understanding is their description of instinctive behavior. Mendoza says
combat arouses his "warrior instinct," which can be inferred to mean some kind of Indian
warrior. TeCube, on the other hand, says the instinct that arises in combat is from "the animal
inside." Although combat in the Vietnam War may bring elements of TeCube's Apache
identity more into focus for himself, the dangers of combat and the inhumane behaviors it
fosters ultimately threaten his status as a human and as an Apache. He says, "Our real selves
were dying, being replaced by individuals molded by the dangerous world we lived in" (146).
In this, TeCube echoes the sentiments of the veterans discussed in Holm's study: " . . . their
ancestors had been correct in viewing warfare as a mysterious disruption in the natural order
and that without proper spiritual preparation, the horrors of war could certainly scar their
very souls forever" (139).
&nbs