{i}
SAIL
Studies in American Indian
Literatures
Series 2
Volume 9, Number
2
Summer 1997
CONTENTS
Pragmatism and American Indian Thought
Sidner Larson
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1
Walking with Jim Northrup and Sharing His "Rez"ervations
Roseanne Hoefel
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.
11
Shaman or Showman
Mace DeLorme
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22
Stories, Humor, and Survival in Jim Northrup's Walking
theRez Road
Chris LaLonde
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23>
Irony and the "Balance of Nature on the Ridges" in
Mathews's Talking to the
Moon
Lee Schweninger
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41
Fishing at Sandy Point
Tiffany Midge
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57
Tribute to Mary TallMountain
Jeane Breinig
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59
Reflections on Mary TallMountain's Life and Writing: Facing
Mirrors
Gabrielle Welford
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61
The Politics of Point of View: Representing History in Mourning
Dove's Cogewea and
D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
Robert Holton
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69
FORUM
From the Editors
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81
Calls for Submissions
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82
{ii}
REVIEWS
Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific
Fact. Vine Deloria,
Jr.
Joanne Marie Barker
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.
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.
84
The Legacy of D'Arcy McNickle: Writer, Historian, Activist.
Ed. John Lloyd Purdy
Andrew McClure
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87
The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Ed. T. Lindsay Baker
and Julie P. Baker
MariJo Moore
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92
Completing the Circle. Virginia Driving Hawk
Sneve
James Treat
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.
.
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94
Bone Game. Louis Owens
Julie LaMay Abner
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.
.
.
96
CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . 98
1997 ASAIL
Patrons:
Sherman Alexie
Karl Kroeber
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
Western Washington University
University of Richmond
and others who wish to remain anonymous
1997
Sponsors:
Harald Gaski
Arnold Krupat
James L. Thorson
and others who wish to remain anonymous
{1}
Pragmatism and American Indian Thought
Sidner Larson
In his book Tribal Secrets:
Vine Deloria, Jr., John Joseph Mathews, and the Recovery
of American Indian Intellectual Traditions, Robert Warrior describes Vine Deloria as
being
committed to pragmatic politics and involved in "a search, at once pragmatic and idealistic,
for answers to the problems of Native communities and the world as a whole" (61-62).
In this sense, pragmatism might be
thought of as comparable to Plains Indian
philosophies that attempt to create a balance between engaging the world as it is encountered
and honoring a world of inherited traditions. This sense of balance is perhaps particularly
valuable to current problems facing local and world communities.
In 1903 John Dewey, chair of the
Department of Philosophy of the University of
Chicago, published an extended discussion of what he had named "instrumental logic," more
popularly known as pragmatism. Dewey insisted on a precise description of the interaction
between the mind and experience, asserting that philosophy was intimately tied to everyday
life and that the philosopher had an obligation to society to use his/her training and ability to
help other people. This was very different from the western tradition, within which, from
Plato to Hegel, intellectual operations of the mind were thought to reflect some sort of ideal
principles of a perfect mind or soul. Dewey's ideas referred to concrete situations in the
present environment and dismissed any attempt to establish a correspondence with absolute
values (Dewey 8).
This basic definition of pragmatism
corresponds in recognizable ways to fundamental
American Indian notions of family, community, spirituality, and relationship to environment.
Such beliefs may be found in texts such as Black Elk Speaks, where sufficient
Lakota oral
tradition was translated into {2} print to give a glimpse
of sophisticated Plains Indian history,
religion, and ceremony. Although reflective of but one of many Indian cultures, Black Elk
Speaks is especially useful in comparative discussion because of the fact it is one of the
better
known Indian stories in America.
Speaking of his visions near the end
of his life, Black Elk said: "I recall the great vision
you sent me . . . hear me that [my people] may once more go back into the sacred hoop and
find the good red road, the shielding tree" (33). Black Elk envisioned two intersecting
realities, the spiritual world, which he called the Red Road, and the earthly world, which he
called the Black Road, roads that come together at the heart of the world through a
flowering tree.
Lakota tradition is rich in content
articulated in complex images, yet it remains very
functional in three important ways. First, the medicine pipe forms the core of a kinship
system based on the circle, a unified form promoting balance among all things. All that the
Lakota see is in the shape of a hoop, organized into finite divisions such as fourths; for
example, four colors, four seasons, four times of day. Additional meanings are organized
within these divisions, creating an order that locates the Indian world within a preexisting
harmony. For example, the color yellow is associated with the east, where day begins with
the yellow sunrise; other stories of beginning might feature an animal transformer, such as a
light-colored horse, as metaphor for a reminder, lesson, or warning.
Second, the natural world is made
sacred by transformations. One important role of
transformers has to do with tempering excess, as illustrated by the fact that being "made
sacred" often means providing for the black road of material life to be balanced by the red
road of spiritual life. In Black Elk's vision such transformation is represented by
"interconnected, renewing life forms in overlapping images, from grandfathers who turn into
horses that turn into elk, buffalo, and eagle" (Lincoln 89). These images often take the form
of helpers, who counsel temperance or warn of danger.
Third, the Lakota social world derives
from the natural world. Place-names such as Pine
Ridge describe the physical makeup of a particular location; time is pictured seasonally by
moons, for example, Moon When the Red Cherries Are Ripe (July) and Moon of the
Popping Trees (December); and stories are told in a language of natural signs, as in Black
Elk Speaks, when Fire Thunder says of the 1867 Wagon Box Fight, "they shot so fast it
[sounded] like tearing a blanket" (14). Utilizing the natural world for sources of meaning ties
earthly and human worlds together by association. The details contained within Black Elk's
story combine to form a powerful narrative, made so by its reflection of complex tribal
metaphysics that may prove helpful to serious problems faced by many societies today.
An example of such metaphysics that
is emblematic of the majority of {3} American
Indian societies is the Iroquois idea of community. Scott L. Pratt has analyzed the early
writings of Cadwallader Colden, who asserts that Iroquois society presented human beings as
fundamentally part of a community rather than as naturally separate beings:
"Individuals" are defined by their place in the community and are judged by their characters as constructive or destructive in the context of the community. In Colden's view the quality of individuals among the Iroquois is a matter of the esteem in which they are held by others in the community for their actions in support of the community itself. (28)
Colden's view differed
significantly from that of other early European thinkers regarding
the relationship of individuals to communities. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and
John Locke incorporated observations about Native Americans to establish the idea that
human persons in the state of nature are fundamentally self-centered.
Pratt's discovery of this particular
conflict is part of his larger suggestion that American
Indians may have influenced American philosophy, such as in the case of pragmatism. In
addition, the study helps illustrate ways academicians are increasingly considering American
Indian intellectual history a valuable resource.
It seems practical that the mystery and
destiny unique to this continent are best
understood through its oldest inhabitants, the Indians. It also follows that familiarity with
their outlooks, as well as with history and science written about them, is necessary to any
attempt to understand the meaning and character of this destiny. Fortunately, there are
well-developed beliefs, such as those of the Lakota and Iroquois, that can help broaden
perspectives toward the natural world and human worldviews, especially where human
worldviews have become dangerously unbalanced.
In the context of lack of balance,
consider for a moment the largely unresolved
genocide perpetrated by Europeans against indigenous peoples of the Americas. Perhaps it is
possible to perpetrate such destruction without consequences, but perhaps it is not. Creation
stories of American Indians suggest inappropriate behavior such as greed-based violence
results in the most dire consequences. From the western plains tribe known as the Gros
Ventre comes this admonition against such improper conduct.
An unknown person, perhaps Nix'ant, became very unhappy with the way people were living. He kicked the ground and water came out and covered the earth. All were drowned but The Crow who flew above, and Nix'ant, who floated on buffalo chips with the chief pipe. Crow and Nix'ant became tired of the water, so Nix'ant unwrapped the pipe, which contained copies of all animals. He sent the Large Loon and {4} the Small Loon to dive for mud, but they were unable to bring any to the surface. Then he sent Turtle, who brought up a little earth inside its feet. From this Nix'ant made land. From tears he made water, from the new land he fashioned more people and animals.
[Nix'ant] told the people if they were good there would be no more water and no more fire. (Before the water rose the world had been burned; this now is the third life.) Then he showed them the rainbow, and told them it was the sign that the earth will not be covered with water again, it means the rain has gone by. He also said there will be another world after this one. (Kroeber 59-61)
Nix'ant became angry with the early people because they "did not know how to do anything" and they "lived like animals," according to the stories contained in Regina Flannery's The Gros Ventres of Montana. From the culture of the eastern Iroquois comes a similar story that further clarifies problematic behavior.
An intermediary figure in the form of a Sky-Woman arrives in a place to make a dwelling for those who need it. Animals help her by diving for earth, or oeh-da, then bear her down to it on their wings. She is called Ata-en-sic, and is pregnant.
The oeh-da grew rapidly and had become an island when Ata-en-sic, hearing voices under her heart, one soft and soothing, the other loud and contentious, knew that her mission to people the island was nearing.
To her solitude two lives were coming, one peaceful and patient, the other restless and vicious. The latter, discovering light under the mother's arm, thrust himself through, to contentions and strife, the right born entered life for freedom and peace.
Foreknowing their powers, each claimed domination and a struggle between them began, Hah-gweh-di-yu claiming the right to beautify the island, while Hah-gweh-da-et-gah determined to destroy. Each went his way, and where peace had reigned discord and strife prevailed. (Converse 32-34)
In the Gros Ventre story,
generally bad behavior is said to have caused the destruction
of the world, and the people are admonished not to repeat their mistakes. In the Iroquois
story the definition of bad behavior is spelled out as being a devaluation of life: "for any
slight offense a man or a woman was killed by his enemy. . . . At night none dared to leave
their doorways lest they be struck down by an enemy's club" (Parker 17).
According to their stories, the
Iroquois
were eventually able to recover equilibrium
when the good brother was able to defeat the bad brother by singing him a song of peace, but
overcoming self-interest and violence in {5} order to
restore harmony was an extremely
difficult thing to do.
These mythic stories are made
relevant by parallels in modern times. For example, Philip
Gourevitch, in a recent discussion of selfish and violent behavior in Rwanda, Africa,
compares Rwanda's social, political, and economic structures to criminal syndicates.
Gourevitch describes how, from a workable tribal society prior to German intervention in
1897, Rwanda's postcolonial civil bureaucracy became efficiently organized into pyramids of
patron-client relationships, as in what has come to be known as the mafia. This
organizational pattern was so rigidly structured that when its chief patron was assassinated,
there was nobody else to assume leadership, and Rwandans insanely murdered what is
thought to be nearly a million fellow-countrymen.
This genocide happened, Gourevitch
concludes, because, "far from being part of the
failed state syndrome that appears to plague some parts of Africa, Rwanda was too
successful as a state" (87). It is ironic that a society can actually be too successful; it is tragic
that Rwandan transformation from a reciprocal and distributive people to worshippers of
private ownership and consumption has resulted in mass murder.
A primary vehicle for the
transformation of reciprocal peoples into worshippers of
private ownership and consumption is a corresponding violent transformation of reality by
language. One outcome of this kind of fundamental disrespect for language is explained by a
Rwandan lawyer, who said, "He loved the Cartesian, Napoleonic legal system, on which
Rwanda's is modeled, but he said that it didn't correspond to Rwandan reality" (93). The
Rwandan system is "petty," the lawyer explained, full of chronic liars who try to tell everyone
what they imagine they want to hear in order to maintain their own game and get what they
are after.
There are disturbing similarities
between the situations of Rwandans and other
contemporary societies. For example, America lives with chronic misinformation generated
by the advertising of rapacious capitalism, and, most unfortunately, by the stories of its own
leaders. Although there is no mistaking misuse of the power of words when businessmen and
other leaders lie openly to get what they are after, it is encouraging to know that such power
can also be used for good.
A pragmatic approach to this duality
suggests engaging the world as it is found today,
on a level equal with that of the world of inherited presumptions. To do so, we must also
disengage from the mystifications, creeds, and dogmas that have blinded us to the full
potential of the present moment in its unfolding and infinite possibilities.
A striking example of disengaging
from mystification is found in a recent dialogue
between a formerly high-ranking representative of Soviet Russia and an American journalist.
When the former head of the Russian {6} K.G.B. was
asked if he felt Russia should repent
for past injustices, he replied, "If there has to be repentance, then let everyone repent. . . .
You should repent for what you've done to the Indians. I haven't heard that from you. If you
repent, we will, too" (Remnick 43). In this instance, face-to-face communication penetrated
decades of mystification, creeds, and dogmas to reveal one of the reasons for Russian distrust
of America.
Another instance of pragmatic
analysis of dogma is explained in accounts of arguments
of so-called revisionists, who claim that the Nazi gas chambers never existed. Ian MacKenzie
has observed that while such outrageous beliefs may never be fully understood, they can be
clarified and countered, rather than being rationalized as part of the uncontrollably figural
nature of language.
MacKenzie begins with Paul de Man's
conclusion that knowledge is contained in written
texts rather than empirical facts (284). Because such knowledge is written, it is vulnerable to
re-writing. The self-fashioned symbols that form the language of knowledge, the primary way
of knowing whatever there is to be known, thus exist as what Wallace Stevens called a
fiction--a coherent and meaningful, but all-too-human, construction.
Continuing a line of de-emphasis of
Enlightenment rationalism is Richard Rorty's
pragmatic acceptance of the necessity of constant re-descriptions of the world. Emphasis is
placed on how these redescriptions function and how they are an effective tool for those who
would hope their redescriptions will be taken up by others. Imagination, metaphor, and
self-creation, in contrast to rationality and argument, are offered as the most effective
methods of redescriptions with potential for cultural change (285).
Examples of redescriptions are
described thus: "The major narrative forms of Holocaust
texts are the diary, the memoir, the historian's 'factual' text, and the novel" (288). The diary is
said to impose the temporal order of hours, days, or weeks; the memoir is contextualized by
its ending; and novels of the Holocaust incorporate memoirs as documentary material
because of their quality of authority.
In addition, in support of
autobiographical forms, ideas that selfhood and will need to
be eliminated as a means of avoiding gratuitous and irresponsible texts are subordinated to
the value of constituting and preserving self as a moral force through writing. MacKenzie
emphasizes this by strongly suggesting the technicalities of argumentation, a strategy used by
revisionist historians of the Holocaust, can be overcome by similarly strong redescription
stressing "the necessarily narrative nature of understanding and how this determines
expression" (291).
MacKenzie's discussion of the
significance of stories and how they are told, and of
imagination rather than reason as the central human faculty, echoes the work of many
contemporary American Indian writers, especially {7}
writers of disturbing memoirs, such as
Wendy Rose and Janet Campbell Hale. Also, consider Leslie Marmon Silko's pragmatic
account of language in her 1977 novel Ceremony:
I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.
He rubbed his belly.
I keep them here
[he said]
Here, put your hand on it
See, it is moving.
There is life here
for the people.
And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing. (2)
It has been the stories of
American Indians, more than anything else, that has allowed
them to survive in the face of such destructive forces as policies of extermination, allotment,
and assimilation. Richard Rorty has captured the essence of such survival in his observation
that "a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of
cultural change" (7).
Examination of existing American
Indian literatures reveals a pragmatic and humanist
authorial personality determined to constitute and preserve American Indians by writing. In
addition, however, much critical work remains to be done. First, narrative history written by
and about American Indians needs to be reviewed. To continue to avoid truly reckoning with
the genocide perpetrated upon the original inhabitants of the Americas is to perpetuate
dangerous falsehoods. To accept the band-aids offered by {8} superficial legislation and a
few token legal decisions as a palliative to such destruction is to become even further
deluded.
Second, those works received as
fiction need to be analyzed far beyond the usual
structuralist and romantic concerns used to legitimize them to mainstream audiences. They
then need to be put into current context, and interpreted as part of a coherent body of work.
There is a rich vein of American Indian fiction that has done a superb job of recovering
important elements of cultures and identities. As suggested by Jack Forbes, however, there
has not been a set of criteria generated from that body of work that is also forward-looking
in terms of being responsive to the political needs of indigenous peoples.
Third, hard questions need to be
addressed concerning the responsibility of Indian
intellectuals to indigenous people living less fortunate lives in reservation and urban
communities. Within this process special attention needs to be paid to the questions
articulated by Robert Warrior: 1) what should the roles of intellectuals be in the struggle for
American Indian freedom? 2) what are the sources we should use in developing an American
Indian criticism? 3) do these approaches allow us to reflect in our work the actually-lived,
contemporary experiences of American Indian people? (84).
Political needs may be better
understood in light of Jonathan Boyarin's analysis of the
relations of Jews and Indians in Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish
Memory.
Boyarin discusses how European and American mainstreams create fascinated images of and
eulogize the other's victim, and the juxtaposition of "native" voices inside the respective
empires as a way of resisting (9-10). Boyarin does not mince words, stating that contrasting
fictions by French Jew Patrick Odiano and American Indian Gerald Vizenor are "the voices
of survivors, written after genocide, on the soil of genocide" (12).
The problem of the genocide
perpetuated against the indigenous peoples of the
Americas, to say nothing of the scope of that genocide, as documented by David Stannard in
American Holocaust, has yet to be fully understood. Nor has there been sufficient
discussion
of the continued genocide under which most of the survivors of the American Holocaust still
exist. Until American Indians can speak of such things as directly as does Jonathan Boyarin
on behalf of Jewish people, they will not have fully recovered their sacred duty to
community, and their discourse will be incomplete.
Robert Edwards has observed
similarities in the thinking of Tolstoy and the American
pragmatist John Dewey: "Tolstoy claimed that the masses of working people have been living
according to the true teachings of Christ, Confucius, Moses and other spiritual masters. They
have known all along to seek happiness by putting first the good of others" (22). Edwards
also notes Dewey's goal in educational reform was to transform education by {9} basing it in
lived experience (26).
Seeking individual happiness by
prioritizing the good of others echoes the manner in
which Iroquois society emphasized the role of human beings as part of a community rather
than as individuals. John Dewey's educational goal of balancing the world of ideas with lived
experience is similar to much older Lakota notions of balancing the black and red roads of
earthly and spiritual existence.
The rampant decline of concepts of
community, with attendant devaluation of life, runs
contrary to the most strident warnings of our oldest literatures. One way this trend can be
countered and redescribed is to instill in intellectuals an obligation to use their observations
and investigations to help effect the good of the human community.
Black Elk's wish that people once
more go back into the sacred hoop and John Dewey's
admonition, "The saint sits in his ivory tower while the burly sinners run the world" (Edman
23), are both expressions of pragmatic thought. Such pragmatism is hopeful not only in the
ways it illustrates connection between two disparate cultures, but for the methodology it
might provide to conduct a search, at once pragmatic and idealistic, for answers to the
problems of Native communities and the world as a whole.
WORKS CITED
Boyarin, Jonathan. Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Converse, Harriet Maxwell. Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois. Ed. Arthur C. Parker. New York State Museum and Sciences Service Bulletin 125, 1908.
Dewey, John. "Thought and its Subject-Matter." Studies in Logical Theory. University of Chicago Decennial Publications, 2nd series, vol 11. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1903.
Edman, Irwin. John Dewey: His Contribution to the American Tradition. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955.
Edwards, Robert. "Tolstoy and John Dewey: Pragmatism and Prosaics." Tolstoy Studies Journal 5 (1992): 15-36.
Flannery, Regina. The Gros Ventres of Montana. Washington DC: The Catholic U of America P, 1953.
Forbes, Jack. "Colonialism and Native American Literature: Analysis." Wicazo Sa Review 3 (1987): 17-23.
Gourevitch, Philip. "Letter From Rwanda: After The Genocide." The New Yorker {10} 18 December 1995: 87-106.
Kroeber, A. L. "Gros Ventre Myths And Tales." Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Ed. Clark Wissler. New York: American Museum of Natural History Trustees, 1908.
Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
MacKenzie, Ian. "Pragmatism, Rhetoric, and History." Poetics Today 16.2 (Summer 1995): 283-91.
Neihardt, John. Black Elk Speaks. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Parker, Arthur C. "The Code of Handsome Lake." Parker on the Iroquois. Ed. William N. Fenton. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1968.
Pratt, Scott L. "The Influence of the Iroquois on Early American Philosophy." Unpublished paper, Department of Philosophy, U of Oregon, 1996.
Remnick, David. "The War For The Kremlin." The New Yorker 22 July 1996: 40-57.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumus. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Vine Deloria, Jr., John Joseph Mathews, and the Recovery of American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services, 1994.
{11}
Walking with Jim Northrup and Sharing His "Rez"ervations
Roseanne Hoefel
After walking and talking with
Jim Northrup during his visits both to LaVonne Brown
Ruoff's 1994 NEH Seminar, "American Indian Literatures: Cultural and Literary Contexts,"
and to Alma College campus the following year, I have come to believe one of Northrup's
main goals is to tell his story from the inside out. Too often his people's story has been
uttered or constructed--falsely or partially--from the outside in. According to Northrup, the
discrepancies in the Anishinaabe story accrue to the sad fact that those who've actually lived
it have not had the opportunity to tell it or to be heard. "What I want to do is tell the real
stories, the real pain of my people," he told my American Indian Literature classes in
February, 1995. In his poetry and short fiction collection, Walking the Rez Road,
Northrup
voices these stories: of surviving the Vietnam War; of the fishing and ricing custom on his
Fond du Lac Reservation where he leads a traditional Anishinaabe life; of their recreation, as
in "Bingo Binge"; and of their relationships, as between Luke and his wife Paneque, who
mutually don "their listening faces," modeling for readers the attentiveness and respect these
testimonies merit.
"Testimonies" is a term I use
advisedly, for Northrup employs everyday language and
rejects conventional euphemisms in ways that allow the reader to bear witness to crucial
moments, through such pivotal characters as Luke Warmwater (allegedly named for the
author's promiscuous uncle who signed into hotels under this pseudonym) and Ben Looking
Back (whose name is rich in suggestion and double entendre). For example, in "Holiday
Inndians," Luke and his cousin meet an overweight woman named June. Butch {12} thinks
she is so big "she could be called June, July and part of August" (65). Unspoken yet
authentic, this candid thought suggests the disbelief on his face as he reaches for another
beer. In "War Talk," one of the many interspersed poems that punctuate the short stories
thematically, a predatory journalist asks a vet how it felt to see friends killed; he replies, "Get
the fuck out of my face," conveying his justifiable rage at the increasingly absurd line of
questioning. As Northrup informed my classes, he is cognizant and respectful of the power of
such language; that is, he doesn't use obscenity, to borrow his phrase, "just to get away with
being a potty mouth."
Clearly, Northrup is keenly aware, as
well, of the impact of his structural choices. In
spite of the fact that his misguided publishing agent had advised him that there was little, if
any, market for multiple genre work, he submitted his manuscript of poems and short stories
a day before the deadline, knowing full well such timing would not permit the press's
alteration. The prefatory poems invite reader input, especially open and conducive as they are
to varied interpretation, yet impressing upon the reader an underlying theme embedded and
developed in the story that follows. This format fosters new ideas and the consideration of
related issues; in "shrinking away," the poem that opens the collection, for instance, the
speaker has "survived the war, but was / having trouble surviving the peace" due to
"nightmares, daymares / guilt and remorse" and the V.A. saying that "Vietnam wasn't a war"
(8-9). Exploiting the rich ambiguity of the title, Northrup's speaker is referred to a
psychiatrist who charges $50/hour, when he is making a mere $125/week, to tell Luke
his
problems and then, later, to burden Luke with the renewed guilt of the psychiatrist's suicide
after Luke stops seeing him.
Realizing in the penultimate line that
"surviving the peace was up to [him]," Luke
launches into a graphic and bone-chilling, nightmarish flashback entitled "Open Heart with a
Grunt," wherein we are confronted with the blood and gore and excruciating agony of war,
its victims, and its helpless witnesses, embodied in the "gray marine" who frequently visits
Luke's nightmares. Herein, in addition to the unforgettable depiction of the grunt's instruction
to pump and pulse a dying comrade's organs, we learn that time stops during the insanity of
such moments indelibly etched in the future veteran's mind and heart, "trapped inside their
minds with the memories of what they saw, heard and felt," creating his dire need for intense
coping skills. What's new here, perhaps only hinted at in the preceding poem, is the gross
injustice of domino-effect death, which does not permit the outward expression of mourning.
Death's relentless immediacy necessitates that the grief and loss be internalized (and
repressed), even when "[t]ime returned to normal as the doctor came out and told them the
gray marine died on the table. They got back into the chopper for the return {13} to the
scene of the firefight" (13).
Not surprisingly, Northrup elaborates
upon such endless horrors in two poems and
stories that follow. "Wahbegan" is a eulogy to his brother who "died in the war / but didn't
fall down / for fifteen tortured years," finally relieving himself of his misery by walking into
traffic. "How about a memorial," the speaker asks, "for those who made it / through the war
/ but still died / before their time?" (14), particularly since almost two times the number who
died in the Vietnam War met their end through suicide.
In the second of these two,"Mine of
Mine," readers are on the edge of their seats as
Luke walks point, "a pedestrian's nightmare" Northrup's ironic wit interjects. Moreover, this
is a nightmare reserved especially for Native American pedestrians, the white self-serving
stereotype of whom claims they are allegedly genetically predisposed to negotiate minefields.
Northrup reminds us here that both World War II and the Korean War incurred a
disproportionately high incidence of Native casualties due to walking point. We are,
alternately, gripped by stunning bylines like "He was staring down at his own funeral," jarred
by such sobering passages as "Luke's morals were on hold, so were his feelings. He thought
of his trigger finger as the judge, jury, and executioner. Luke was a young killing machine
trying to stay alive "(15), and riveted by the pitiable comic relief of such subtleties as the
telling absence of the refrain "that wouldn't work" at the close of the following passage:
Now what? he thought. Out in the open pinned by a mine. He started to think of ways to get off the mine. Let's see now, I could put my helmet and flak jacket over the mine and dive away from the blast. That wouldn't work, he might be diving on another mine. I could just stay here and live out the rest of my life anchored to this mine, he thought. That wouldn't work, the sniper might forget his third person rule. I could shit my pants, he thought. (16)
Northrup proceeds to walk us haltingly through this danger zone, delineating his character's otherwise intricately unfathomable sensations, including his disbelief when he is safely delivered of the wire and his instantaneous shock when his fellow marine "disappeared in a cloud of dirty smoke [h]is crumpled body thrown to the ground" (17), and Luke holds his dead hand until the chopper arrives. Here, the chopper aptly serves as the daunting auditory motif which links him and us to the present moment as the reader becomes aware only now that this entire story was yet another vivid flashback incurred by his visit to "the Wall, the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial" after he'd read "the book of the dead":
When he found the marine's name, he reached up and {13} touched the letters cut into stone. When he did, he felt relieved, almost like he had been carrying a pack for the past twenty years and could now take it off. He offered tobacco as his eyes began to burn and fill with tears.
A bearded vet came over. He wore a faded camouflage jacket. His baseball cap proudly proclaimed that he was a Vietnam vet. He hugged Luke and said, "Welcome home, brother." (18-19)
Understandably, the reader is
eager for the comic respite his gut-honest opening lines of
the following poem provide as we begin "walking point" with him: "his asshole puckered up
tight" (20). This brief relief replenishes the courage we need to absorb the understated
message of the fifth stanza: "He sang to himself as / his senses gathered evidence / of his
continued existence" (20), the intensity of which the speaker likewise alleviates with a
momentary lapse into humor: "He amused himself as he walked along. / The old story about
bullets, ha, / don't sweat the ones that got your / name, worry about the ones addressed: / to
whom it may concern" (21). After he puts his training into practice, he reflects: "The
shooting is over in five seconds / the shakes are over in a half-hour / the memories are over
never" (21), in this instance not followed by a joke to spare us the implications of
this terrible
and shameful reality.
We continue our excursion with
Northrup, this time over the literal and figurative
bridge that links the strategic opening Vietnam theme--strategic because even the most
resisting or biased reader can't help but be hooked by Northrup's moving rendition of a
universally potent subject--with the stories and poems of everyday reservation life. In
"Veteran's Dance," Luke's cousin, Lug, attends a powwow and visits his concerned and
supportive sister, complete with comforting cornbread, both of which prove, again literally
and figuratively, instrumental to his healing. "Ever since the war he felt disconnected from
the things that made people happy" (22). Familiarity grounds him in recovery, not only of his
roots and origins, but of his sense of belonging:
Sitting in a red-and-white-striped powwow chair was an old lady who looked like his grandma. She wore heavy brown stockings held up with a big round knot at the knees. She chewed Copenhagen and spit the juice in a coffee can just like his gram. Of course, Lug's grandma had been dead for ten years, but it was still a good feeling to see someone who looked like her. (23)
Therapeutic humor surfaces, as well, when Luke's cousin stops "at a food stand called Stand
Here" (23). When Lug confesses to his sister the grueling accidental shooting of an incognito
female enemy soldier, Judy tries through {15} her
trembling and tears to console him with
the fact that he won a Purple Heart. We learn vet lingo, then, for Lug and his comrades
disdainfully termed the Purple Hearts "Idiot Awards. It meant that you fucked up somehow"
(29). Judy facilitates Lug's and the reader's relief through a visit to a spiritual man's house,
attendance at a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Program, and her generous offer to him of
her MIA husband's ceremonial regalia. This contemporary blend of recuperative gestures
evokes the midewiwin, whereby shamanic insight and a drum ceremony combine
to offer a
mystical cure (Grim 56-73). Northrup dances us through to healing humor with cousin
Fuzzy's "new flavor for Vietnam Vets: Agent Grape" joke at which "both [men] laughed at
themselves for laughing" (34).
We join the laughter with the
undeniably "poetic" description of the quintessential "rez
car" which follows. This is our official vehicle to the rez road where we come to understand
both what it is to be "broke" and to live rich, that is, surrounded by relatives. The most
comprehensive journey manifests itself in this used, loud, steering wheel-less, defunct-radio
car for which none "of the tires are brothers"; yet, like the survivor it represents, it still stops
and starts, and thereby demonstrates survival strategies from the survivor's point of view:
"What else is a car / supposed to do?" is the closing question, one which resonates almost
nostalgically in Northrup's claim that casino profits may make rez cars an endangered
species.
Likewise, what else is this
Anishinaabe, Vietnam vet, brother, husband, father, tour
guide of the rez supposed to do, except sustain the reader's own journey, through such casual
conversation as the opening question of the eulogy to his brother: "Didja ever hear a sound?"
Our walk with him is comfortable and non-threatening yet simultaneously powerful and
effective. We are not embarrassed by his stated goal in this collection, for his "brain to take a
shit," which is part of the book's universal appeal. While stories about ricing (e.g., "Work
Ethic" and "Ricing Again") are specific glimpses into traditional Fond du Lac lifeways,
largely the selections are about being human. How many of us nod in laughter to "Bloody
Money" which is reminiscent of a time we were so broke we sold our plasma? How many of
us revisit memories so vivid we are all but transported to past faces and locales? Ingeniously,
even Northrup's specific allusion to the once-popular denial of the Vietnam War's existence
and ramifications subtly bespeaks a similar pattern of willful ignorance and omission from
consciousness surrounding the near genocide of Native peoples. Readers can't help but draw
parallels between these two tragedies. This unconventional coupling is but one didactic
tactic.
As one student, a police officer and
older, attested in his journal for the American
Indian Literature course I taught in 1995:
{16}
[O]ne of Northrop's main purposes for writing is to educate . . . us stupid white folks on his culture. When he was reading the questions that people ask him, and answering most with cutting sarcasm and humor, I thought that what bothered him most was that white people still have not learned diddly squat about Native American culture. We still believe the stereotypes and the John Wayne films. In Walking the Rez Road, we get a no nonsense work which highlights just what it is like to be a Native American in today's society. It means to be poor and treated like a criminal. The way he does this educating is humorous and entertaining, but it is also sad.
His stories are funny, but they have a bite to them. When I read his accounts of life, I was filled with remorse and guilt. One story which spoke to me was "Culture Clash," when Luke came across his brother Almost and rushed him to the hospital. Then Luke ended up in jail and his brother joined him. The tendency for the police to assume the worst and the ready way they beat the Natives up depressed me, especially when I remember that most of the stories are true.
Northrup also wants things to change. He wants understanding, and the first step is education. We have to realize there is a problem, then we can change things.
To be sure, other readers recognize the symbolism of that sobering story, "Culture Clash,"
and "Wewiibitaan" (which means "Hurry Up"), even amidst our laughter at the absurdity of a
kneejerk, if not hysterical, reaction by police officers who establish a roadblock for one
Indian youth who resisted the ego-gratifying authorities' abuse. Another effective teaching
tool is the unadulterated expression of anger. Meriting the poet's wrath, for example, is the
popularization by Hollywood and 1980s presidents of the Vietnam War. Too little, too late,
after two decades of neglect, abuse, or sheer indifference, according to "time wounds all
heels." In this poem Northrup catalogues the manifestation of what he refers to in
"ogichidag" (warriors) as "the bitterness of / the only war America ever lost" (164). Written
on the eve of Northrup's own son's potential debarkation to the Gulf War, the poem offers a
litany of the twentieth-century wars that have painfully informed the lives of the speaker's
male relatives, the war stories a trademark of the surviving warriors.
In similar fashion, Northrup tells
other
stories of survival. In "Work Ethic" Luke seeks a
means to paying his bills and to evading imprisonment due to delinquent child support,
though he is not willing to compromise his sense of self in the process. For example, when he
begins to cast the same "vacant" smiles of his co-workers at the pizza shop, he seeks
employment elsewhere. Unfortunately losing his "dream job" due to the indiscretion of
sleeping on a waterbed as a promotional gimmick, Luke works in a machine {17} shop until
he realizes he'd become an extension of it. In every case, other "ethics" take precedence over
the blind subservience which the dominant culture designates as "work."
Significantly, the job Luke most
enjoys is culturally based, as we discover in "Ricing
Again." Here we glimpse the culmination of Northrup's summer rice-fanning basket-crafting,
to which he pays tribute in the poem "Weegwas" (birch bark), "another gift from the
Creator" (78), an art that has been passed down from grandfather to grandson for centuries.
As Northrup puts it, for the Anishinaabe, "ricing is never more than eleven months away."
Ricing also serves as an incentive to halt the community binge that Northrup depicts in "Your
Standard Drunk" as being fueled by whites who still bring alcohol by the truckload to the rez.
Ricing's social and practical benefits make this pivotal activity a community favorite:
He knew the people enjoyed ricing and there were good feelings all around. As he drove to the lake, memories of past ricing seasons came to him. His earliest memories were of playing on the shore while his parents were out ricing. Years seemed to melt from people. Grandparents moved about with a light step and without their canes. Laughing and loud talking broke out frequently. The cool crisp morning air, the smell of wood smoke, roasting meat, and coffee were all part of these early childhood memories.
When he grew older, his responsibilities increased. He took care of his brothers and sisters. He cleaned the canoes and rice boats of every last kernel of rice. He learned how to make rice poles and knockers. He learned how important ricing was to the people. (94)
Reciprocal giving rules the day, and the rhythm of the falling rice "made Luke feel good"
(95), as does the echo of laughter throughout their ritual. The rich tradition that accrues to
this practice, described by awestruck ethnographers as early as the 1900s (Densmore 128),
Northrup vividly evokes in his warm and moving poem "Mahnomin" (wild rice). From the
tobacco offering of thanks and the personification of calm water, rice heads, wind, and
smiling sun, to the "talk of other lakes, other seasons / fingers stripping rice while / laughing,
gossiping, remembering," the ricers feel good and contribute to another canoeful of
memories that constitute the natural progression of generations (98).
Indeed it is the strength born of being
one of the Anishinaabe generations, in "brown
and white peek," that enables the stamina and spirituality essential to overcoming the
"manifest destiny dominant society" (105) and avoiding its excesses. Replete with the ironies
that accompany the persistence of myth and stereotype which spawn such lame questions as
the {18} voyeuristic one that opens the poem, "What's it
like living on the rez?," the reply
offers some poetic justice, finds "something good / in something grim" (104), by redeeming
chronic unemployment "when the white guys get lung cancer / from breathing asbestos at the
mill."
No wonder, thus, that Northrup's
fiction walks the reader "a mile in [his] moccasins"
(105) surrounding the un(der)employment scene alone. For example, "The Odyssey" is
another comical job hunt story, this time involving a "rez truck," the back of which is filled
with exaggerated coup tales, including those involving jail time. A series of mishaps--the
truck door and fan belt falling off, the engine catching fire--ironically brings the aspiring
laborers three weeks' work and even more joke material than they'd anticipated. This is the
case as well in "The Yellow Hand Clan," where Luke and his friend, Rod Grease, do hard
summer labor building basements, complete with slapstick antics, long enough to collect
unemployment through the winter months.
Also laced with slapstick is "Fritz and
Butch," who entertain media personnel and
themselves at the Duluth Radisson Hotel by performing Nixon impersonations and signing
autographs as then-Vice President Mondale must have. Here, rather than steady work, it is
the familiar, the fun, the effort to "snag" three White Earth reservation women that warms
Luke with a smile and assures him that "Life was back to normal" (52).
To maintain that normalcy or
stability,
the speaker in the "end of the beginning" poem
proffers, one must heed the wisdom of the oral tradition. "Someone said" and "Another old
saying says" are phrases calling readers back to oral wisdom, the central message of which is
to live like each day is one's last (68). This wisdom of the ages literally takes the shape of a
tipi in "tipi reflections," which the speaker joyfully and peacefully inhabits, observing both
current and timeless miracles and images that signify his origins:
The smell of wood smoke
clings to me when I have to
go to the city, it is a
reminder of where I come from
and where I'm going. (62)
This caution would have been sound advice for the "three skins" in the vignette that follows,
"Coffee Donuts" (69-71). Happy to be alive, free, and "cashy," these riders are revelling in
their day of mobility and fun, anticipating hunting or reading O. Henry stories, completely
oblivious to the grain truck with sleeping driver barrelling toward them--a frightful scenario
Northrup had foreshadowed thirty pages earlier in his poem "death two." A cautionary poem
of a different nature occurs in the center of the collection, {19}"Lifetime of sad." This poem
originated, according to Northrup, as an alternative to becoming angry or hurtful toward the
lonely, alcoholic, 50-year-old woman it sympathetically portrays. As the title suggests, her
eyes tell the heart-wrenching story of a wife, widowed twice over by "the white man's wars,"
of a mother left behind, and of a cancer survivor who is losing a more insidious "battle with
the bottle" (84).
Poetry serves a different function in
"where you from?," which Northrup cited as a
question "Shinnobs" always ask each other upon meeting, as a way to connect or to discover
if there's any relation. This poem, then, is his artistic effort to respond by describing Sawyer
with its wild rice lakes, abundant sugar trees, sacred ceremonies, other natural beauties, and,
interspersed throughout, rich survival humor: "Hocking a satellite dish for bingo / is possible
but difficult" (91).
Another poem addressing the
speaker's identity is "barbed thoughts," which resonates
with the pride of his spear-fishing heritage and defiance of redneck opposition to their
hunting, gathering, and eating rights, which troublemakers dismiss as "Treaty" rights. This
understandably angry poem spits at the indignities of "threats, gunfire, and bombs," of
state-proposed "buyout[s]," of greedy and insensitive media columnists and newscasters
(136), the entire complex of which tries to deracinate Anishinaabe from "their generational
wisdom."
Less terse, the story which follows,
"Jabbing and Jabbering," exposes more fully the
hinted-at corrupt reservation government that is willing to put a price tag on heritage.
Northrup describes the Reservation Business Committee's conspicuous consumption,
gluttony, betrayal, and deceit--the latter, for example, in pacifying the "renegades" who
would resist the leasing of property rights by fabricating some makeshift work project. In
contrast to the cynicism with which the author develops such scenes, he delivers the actual
spear-fishing expedition with grace and poetic imagery, including the good-hearted donation
of their productive night on the water to the Elderly Nutrition Program. The RBC's main
concern in the face of the pervasive protest that ensued from the disclosure of their
treaty-leasing is the potential effect upon their re-election. Their feeble and insincere attempt
to save face by spear-fishing with Tuna Charlie and Luke backfires when the latter alert the
media. Sweet and subtle revenge results from the RBC Chair and District Two
Representative's comedy of errors, which leave them capsized, dripping wet, and fishless in
the glare of TV cameras panning the ridiculous scene.
A more biting indictment pervades
"1854-1988," the poem that follows; in this case, the
just reward for bureaucratic sellouts is their grandchildren "piss[ing] on their graves" (148).
The sardonic and frequent refrain, "The bottom line is the bottom line," mocks the platitudes
tribal government, such {20} as the one which chastised
Northrup for the criticism in this
poem, spouts to placate the people they diminish in what the author portrays as their
materialistic and egocentric inclination.
Northrup's collection is about
survivors of oppression, trying to outlive the
circumstances to which they've been sentenced and attempting to withstand acculturation, or
alcoholism, or the struggle to obliterate someone else's oppression yet furthering their own in
the process. Northrup skillfully debunks one superficial museumgoer's desire to reify Indians
as safely antiquated relics of the past, learning about them through objectification
rather than
from them through interaction. This scenario is hilariously depicted in the story
"Looking
with Ben": here, Ben Looking Back makes a "contemporary Chippewa" sign, stands beside
it, and then leaves, resulting in an empty display which poignantly drives home to the rez and
our minds the idea that Natives have been excluded from common consciousness. It is no
surprise that Northrup drafted this, in my view, now perfect piece six times in order to be
able to play with language, as he so ably achieves in the scene where Ben tells Luke of his
charades:
"With some of them, I was a Chippewa, with others, I was a Sioux. Sometimes I'd be a Comanche, and right at the end there, I was telling them I was half Chippewa, half Ojibway, and the rest was Anishinaabe. Some of the tourists were writing this stuff down as I talked. I had a good time with the tourists," Ben concluded. (159)
Here, Northrup enacts his credo that whites were put here to amuse Indians. Neither an
apology or plea, this saga of triumphs and failures, from the pain of familial loss to the
slapstick of Ben's Smithsonian escapades, guides the reader intimately through the lifestyle
and problems that accrue to Rez inhabitants: high unemployment, scarce funds, and
government difficulties, largely the result of white negligence and ignorance.
Luke, like Ben, never loses his vital
sense of humor, laughing and crying in the same
breath, yet resoundingly choosing laughter as a remedy to turmoil, to the death and prejudice
inhering in what Northrup refers to as "the hate circle" of racism that surrounds them and
makes the rez a haven for rejuvenation and solitudinous grace. In this way and others, he is
an ideal embodiment of what Craig Womack advocated at the 1995 Modern Language
Association conference: one who writes to and for his people, in a variety of genres and
venues. For example, Northrup linguistically circumvents this hate circle by translating into
Ojibway most of his poems; he continues to write bilingually as a sign of silent yet poignant
protest. More vocal is his "Fond du Lac Follies" column wherein he writes on various
minority issues such as Indian gaming and gambling, the latter of {21} which he views as a
current test of Indian spirit and integrity, a mixed blessing and curse as both a source of
employment and income, yet a locus for corruption.
Northrup is among 50,000 Natives in
Minnesota, one of five or six among 300 or so
Native Minnesotan authors who write for a living, maintaining a question-of-the-month
catalogue since, as he claims with a grin, "whites are such slow learners." Here, he deploys
such unforgettable zingers as: "How long have you been an Indian?" "46 years. It would've
been 47 but I was sick a year"; and "Do you speak your language?" "Yup, yours too"; and,
my personal favorite: "Are Indians really psychic?" "I knew you were going to ask
me that, I
just knew it!" (campus reading, 15 February 1995). With such wit and multiple
gifts, it's not
surprising that Northrup's work is award winning, securing both the Sixth Annual
Northeastern Minnesota Award, which recognizes books that best represent Northeastern
Minnesota's history, culture, heritage, or lifestyle, and the Minnesota Book Award in the
personal voices category, having been chosen from 68 nominees in 14 categories.
Northrup is generous to walk readers
through not only the minefields he and the
Anishinaabe have already negotiated and continue to negotiate, but also through the veritable
gold mine of riches they inhabit. A poem that embodies this strolling metaphor, "Walking
through," shows poetry in yet another light. Here the speaker metaphorically pays tribute to
his wife and the solidness of their loveship, for instance as they trudged through swamps,
content to experience "the trees, the tracks, the quiet" (112). Readers, too, are enriched by
the journey in his moccasins, through landscapes and soundscapes we won't soon forget.
Clearly, then, we would do well to heed Joy Harjo's wise advice on the dust jacket: "These
stories are full of laughter and the wisdom that is gained from heartbreak and loss. Pass them
on!"
WORKS CITED
Densmore, Frances. Chippewa Customs. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1979.
Grim, John. Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1983.
Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Customs. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
Northrup, Jim. Campus reading, Alma College, 15 February 1995.
---. Walking the Rez Road. Stillwater MN: Voyageur, 1993.
{22}
Shaman or Showman
Mace J. DeLorme
{23}
Stories, Humor, and Survival in Jim Northrup's Walking the Rez Road
Chris LaLonde
Crossblood Anishinaabe writer
Gerald Vizenor takes part of the title for Wordarrows:
Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade, his 1978 collection of narratives, from N. Scott
Momaday's retelling of the traditional Kiowa story of the arrowmaker. A Kiowa was making
arrows one night when he noticed someone looking in from outside. He continued his work,
straightening an arrow with his teeth and fitting it to his bow to be sure it would draw true,
all the while talking with his wife as he aimed the arrow at random. As if addressing her, he
said, "I know that you are there on the outside. . . . If you are a Kiowa, you will understand
what I am saying, and you will speak your name" (qtd. in Wordarrows viii).
Receiving no
answer, the arrowmaker had his aim fall upon the enemy outside, let the arrow fly, and killed
him. The story is important for Momaday and Vizenor, and others, because it indicates that
language can be used as an effective weapon in the struggle for survival.
In the written tradition of the
Anishinaabe we can see this awareness of language's
power at least since the mid-nineteenth-century writings of George Copway, or
Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh. For instance, in The Ojibway Conquest (1850), a long poem
written in
heroic couplets, Wen-di-go tells Me-gi-si that, while he could easily have taken his life, he
has "a tale will pierce thy heart / Worse than a foeman's dart,--" (29). Over a century later,
contemporary Anishinaabe writers Vizenor, Gordon Henry, Jr., Louise Erdrich, Kimberly
Blaeser, and others indicate a similar understanding of language's power and use words to
craft poems and stories in the name of survival. Blaeser, for instance, puts the case clearly:
"Like many Indian people, I write partly to remember, because remembering, we recover;
{24} remembering, we survive" (xi). Such is also true
for fellow Anishinaabe Jim Northrup,
the author of poems, stories, newspaper columns, a play, and the 1993 collection Walking
the Rez Road. Contrary to the ethnographic and historical studies of the Anishinaabe that
Vizenor takes to task in The People Named the Chippewa for inventing tribal
people and
culture, Northrup's book is a striking imagining and rendering of contemporary Anishinaabe
life. And in the tradition of works by Copway, Vizenor, and others, Walking the Rez
Road
stresses the importance of language, stories, and humor to survival.
Walking the Rez Road is a
collection of twenty-one poems and twenty-one stories
whose subjects include the Vietnam war, Anishinaabe culture and history, and contemporary
reservation life. The overall picture created for the reader is produced in part by the order of
the pieces that Northrup stipulated contrary to his publisher's suggestion. It is worth
remarking that Native scholars and storytellers have recognized the importance of sequence
in Anishinaabe storytelling sessions. In thinking about stories told concerning the tribal
trickster and culture hero Nanabush, for instance, Ridie Wilson Ghezzi notes that "the way
they are joined together depends on the artistry and the intentions of the narrator" (445).
Skill and intent, then, shape the sessions in a fashion Ron Evans sees as akin "to a piece of
beadwork: one could create a different picture depending on how one strung the beads
together" (qtd. in Ghezzi 445). In Walking the Rez Road Northrup begins stringing
texts
together with a poem whose first word, "Survived," highlights the subject of survival which
resonates throughout the book (8). Like Abel in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of
Dawn,
Tayo in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Whirling Soldier in Joy Harjo's
"Northern
Lights," the poem's narrator has "Survived the war" but is "having trouble surviving / the
peace" (8). He turns to a psychologist to help him deal with the "Nightmares, daymares /
guilt and remorse" (8). He stops seeing the "shrink" both because of the expense and because
it was not doing him any good, experiences more guilt when the psychologist kills himself,
and finally realizes "that surviving / the peace was up to me" (9).
Walking the Rez Road is
concerned with far more than a veteran surviving a war and its
effects on the psyche, however, whether that veteran is the nameless narrator of the war
poems in the text; Lug, whose story is told in "Veteran's Dance"; Lug's cousin Luke
Warmwater, ostensively the protagonist of the book; or Vietnam vet Northrup himself.
Rather, Walking the Rez Road makes clear that the veterans are only a part of the
greater
Anishinaabe population that has been and is continually faced with the problem of
survivance.1 Like Blaeser, Northrup would have his readers remember, or learn
and
remember, and two poems in particular up the ante {25}
to include not just the survival of
war veterans and contemporary shinnobs, but all the people at least since the signing of the
1854 La Pointe treaty which ceded Anishinaabe homeland in the arrowhead region of
Minnesota to the United States Government: "1854-1988" and "ditched."
"1854-1988" links the original treaty
signers with contemporary tribal government
leaders acting contrary to the best interests of the people. The La Pointe treaty signers gave
up the land even though their people told them not to sell. Placing a dollar value on the land
and traditional lifeways is at the heart of the outrage:
You sold our birthright, you paleface Indians.
Faces pale from kissing the white man's ass.
The bottom line is the bottom line.
The State flashes chump change,
indigent Indians are buffaloed.
Hunting, fishing, and gathering
now have a dollar value.
The bottom line is the bottom line. (148)
The repetition of "The bottom line is the bottom line" throughout the poem accentuates the
disabling truth at its heart: "Money talks, whispers, threatens, / and finally seduces" (148).
Vizenor notes in his introduction to
Summer in the Spring that "The fur traders learned
the languages and stories of the woodland and enmeshed tribal families in the predatory
economics of peltry" (7). Money, alcohol, and material goods were the tools of seduction
used to lure the Anishinaabe away from traditional lifeways and enmesh them in a fur trade
that "interposed economic anomalies between the intuitive rhythms of woodland tribal
communities and the spiritual equipose of the traditional anishinaabe"
(Summer 7-8). The
people were indeed "buffaloed": literally and figuratively slaughtered by the United States
Government thanks to its plan of relocation to reservations like White Earth and Fond du
Lac, and assimilation once there.
The narrator of "1854-1988" refuses
to succumb to despair, however; rather, we are
reminded that "Anishinaabe have survived / missionaries and miners, / timber barons and
trappers," and told they will "survive the bureaucrats / and policy makers" (148) as well.
They will also remember their ancestors who sold out:
Bury the sellouts deep, their
grandchildren will want to
piss on their graves.
The bottom line is the bottom line. (148)
The poem closes on a note of appropriation rather than assimilation, as the {26} bottom line
is transformed from an economic phrase to a moral one and becomes the grandchildren's
graphic indication and indictment of the immorality of their grandparents' actions.
"Ditched," a poem focusing on the
plight of a young Anishinaabe at the Pipestone
federal boarding school, makes clear one of the primary difficulties faced by subsequent
generations after the signing of the La Pointe treaty, a difficulty which if not overcome would
mean there will be no grandchildren able and willing to urinate on the graves of
wrong-minded tribal leaders. The system of boarding schools set up by organized religions
and the Federal government in the nineteenth century was designed to accelerate the process
of acculturation and assimilation by breaking the connection between Anishinaabe youth,
their families, their sense of place, their language, and their stories.2 The poem's
protagonist
receives only an "icy blue-eyed stare" when he says hello to a white in Anishinaabemowin
and a beating from a second grader after crying about the icy stare. The boy runs away, gets
caught, and is beaten by both the whites for running and a second grader for crying about the
beating he has received. As is the case with "1854-1988," however, "ditched" does not end
on a despairing note. Rather, we learn that the young Anishinaabe "Toughed it out /
Survived" (72). We do not learn specifically how the boy "toughed it out," which is in
keeping with a Native tenet of having the story resonate beyond the words in the imagination
and experiences of the audience,3 but we know that he survived. The lack of
terminal
punctuation at the end of the poem, moreover, indicates that the struggle for survival
continues for the Anishinaabe today.
The reality of Native life on the Rez
road makes survival difficult, of course, and
Northrup does not shy away from presenting an honest picture of the reservation. For
instance, the narrator of "brown and white peek" responds to the question "What's it like
living on the rez?" by pointing out that "The word reservation is a misnomer / reserved for
who? / The white man owns 80 percent of my rez . . ." (104). The Anishinaabe are nearly as
jobless as they are landless: there is "70 percent unemployment on the rez / go down the road
a few miles, it's 5 percent" (104). Anishinaabe writer, educator, and activist Winona LaDuke
uses statistics from a study done at the White Earth reservation to show the importance of a
"land-based economy and way of life" in the face of seemingly staggering economic hardship.
"While unemployment was listed by the Department of Labor at approximately 75 percent,
most people were 'employed' in a land-based economy" (xiii-xiv) that features such
traditional activities as sugarbushing and the harvesting of fowl, small and large game, fish,
and wild rice. Using White Earth as her example, LaDuke concludes that "in many Native
communities the traditional land-based economy, and in fact this way of life, remains a
centerpiece of the community" (xiv).
{27}
Perhaps more so than any of his
contemporaries, Northrup celebrates in poetry and
fiction the traditional land-based economy and material culture of the Anishinaabe. Poems
like "end of the beginning," "weegwas," "mahnomin," and "walking through" highlight both
the traditional lifeways and the essential connections between the individual, ancestors, and
the natural world which they help to establish and maintain. For instance, in "weegwas" the
narrator points out that in gathering birch bark s/he is "Just doing what grandpa did / like his
grandpa before him" (78). In "walking through," being awakened by the sun, walking in the
woods by "an old sugar bush" with a loved one, and recognizing that "the wigwam frame is
in a good location" (112) bring together past, present, and future, the Creator, and a wife and
husband in a fashion that has nothing to do with capitalist economics and money and
everything to do with the traditional lifeways of the people. Those lifeways, as Vizenor
points out, are intimately connected to the strong woods of northern Minnesota, where
The Anishinaabe learned to hear the seasons by natural reason, and tribal dreamers heard the stories of creation in bangishimog noodin, the west wind, their relations to the animals, birds, stones, the heat of visions, and the everlasting circles of the sun and moon and human heart. The first tribal families trailed the shores of gichigami to the hardwoods and marshes where they touched the maple trees for ziizibaakwadaaboo in the spring, speared fish on the rivers, and then gathered manoomin, wild rice in the late autumn. (Summer 5)
"Mahnomin," Northrup's poem
about the annual gathering of wild rice, indicates how
taking part in an aspect of the traditional lifeways of the Anishinaabe reaffirms the essential
connection with place and family. The poem opens with an image of spirituality and
thanksgiving and proceeds with language which makes clear that the relationship between the
people and the place is reciprocal, genuine, and sensuous. The lake "welcomed" the people,
the rice "nodded in agreement" with the lake, and the "sun smiled everywhere" (98). The
people, in turn, "caressed" the ripe rice heads in loving thanks for the gift. "Ricing again,
megwetch Munido" (98) explicitly thanks the Creator for enabling the people to gather the
rice; the people are as thankful for the reaffirmation of the lifeways and the connection with
place given by Munido as they are for the rice which will help them survive the coming
winter.
Ricing connects people with place,
with Munido, with each other, with past
generations, and with the future:
Relatives came together
talk of other lakes, other seasons
fingers stripping rice while
{28}
laughing, gossiping, remembering.
It's easy to feel a part of
the generations that have
riced here before. (98)
Northrup's characters can be glad for the natural world unspoiled by "progress," for "the colors of blue and green [that] rest the eyes and spirits" ("where you from?" 91), and--perhaps most of all--for the sense of place and connection established and reaffirmed by the nearness of generations past. Moreover, the "Tobacco [that] swirled in the lake" (98) as offering to the rice and Munido likewise unites the people with future harvests on this lake. Therefore it is small wonder that
It felt good to get on the lake
it felt better getting off
carrying a canoe load of food
and centuries of memories. (98)
Nevertheless, as Northrup points
out in "barbed thoughts," attempting to hunt, fish, and
gather in accordance with the lifeways and the rights granted by treaty can run contrary to
the wishes of the reservation government because "it makes some white people mad" and can
lead "rednecks [to] try to stop us / with threats, gunfire, and bombs" (136).
Walking the Rez Road makes
clear that stories and humor are important weapons with
which to counter threats from what Northrup labels "the manifest destiny dominant society"
and insure survival. Again Northrup's poem opening the volume is instructive. For in addition
to highlighting the fundamental issue of survival with its first word, "shrinking away"
emphasizes stories and suggests a telling juxtaposition between ways of seeing stories and
their value. "Shrinking away" is both a turning to the healing power of stories and a turning
away from psychoanalysis, a white way of healing predicated on stories. Life stories told and
interrogated in the analytic session are the vehicle for the self-awareness necessary for
healing to begin. Resolutely focused on the story of the analysand's essential trauma, the
interrogation strives to illuminate the ways in which the trauma is prefigured and sought out
by the psyche, thereby illuminating the incongruity or lack of harmony between an
individual's Self and the projection of self he or she presents. Analysis may be one way of
using stories therapeutically, but "shrinking away" makes it clear that it is not the right
way.
It is obvious that the analyst violates
the analyst/analysand relationship. The narrator
tells us that they
Spent six
sessions establishing
rapport, heard about his
{29}
military life,
his homosexuality,
his fights with his mother
and anything else he wanted
to talk about. (8-9)
The analyst shrinks from his role as the mostly silent partner in the relationship and instead
tells his story and reveals his trauma. Such a perversion dooms the relationship, of course,
but that is not why analysis is the wrong way to use stories therapeutically, no matter how
professionally sound the analyst. Nor does analysis fail because the analyst is white and the
analysand is not; racial identity is not revealed in the poem. Analysis cannot be the right way
for the narrator or the other characters in Walking the Rez Road to survive the
peace because
it establishes a false connection. The analyst's fee, which is stated and then twice referred to,
is the symbol of that false connection and the means by which it is perpetuated.
"Shrinking away" exposes an inherent
liability of the psychoanalytic session and ends
with the narrator's realization "that surviving / the peace was up to me," so a reader might
conclude that this means the narrator needs to establish and maintain an egocentric position
in order to survive. No conclusion could be more comforting. Maintaining that "shrinking
away" ends on a note of self-reliance enables a reader to imagine that the poem, written by a
Native American, champions one of the fundamental tenets of American ideology and as a
result indicates both an awareness of that tenet and an acknowledgement of its importance to
surviving and flourishing in contemporary America. As such, one can rest easy knowing,
thanks to a convenient extrapolation of the many from the one, that the Native Americans
have adopted the "natural" mind set and worldview of the majority culture. They have been,
at long last, assimilated. The fact that the narrator dismisses psychoanalysis, traditionally
distrusted and discounted by many Americans, is yet another point in his
favor.4
Walking the Rez Road does
not support such a reading, however. Rather, the stories
and poems make it clear that, while it is up to the individual to make the effort to survive,
survival is predicated upon connection and community as each is established in and through
stories. But while stories are integral to healing and survival, they do not in themselves
necessarily establish a true connection. In fact "The Jail Trail," a short story describing Luke
Warmwater's treatment for alcohol abuse, makes clear that stories can be abused and their
power perverted. Treatment consists of storytelling sessions centering on past episodes of
drunkenness. The stories will be accepted only "if one could work up a good cry" (87). The
hollowness of the stories told in the treatment center is indicated by the disclosure that one
must manufacture an emotional response, complete with {30} "wailing, gnashing of teeth,
and heaving sobs" (87), in designated "crying rooms." In perfect accord with the reality of
late twentieth-century American consumer culture, at the treatment center image is
everything. Luke learns from another "skin" how to act in such a place and begins "to live the
role of the drying-out-drunk" (88) in order to survive the treatment center, but that act
establishes only the most tenuous of connections because it masks rather than reveals. The
connection with the other "skin" in treatment is not predicated on stories which reveal self
and articulate connection. Rather, while his ability as a storyteller puts him "ahead of the
others in the 'group grope' sessions" (87), Luke is still subject to the misappropriation of
stories that determines the nature of the center and its treatment program. Perhaps this is
why Northrup opts not to recount the stories with which Luke Warmwater "spills his guts."
Luke must have done so in order to "graduate out into the real world," but Northrup refuses
to validate such a perversion of storytelling by including it in "The Jail Trail."
The stories told in the group sessions
of "The Jail Trail" can be juxtaposed with those in
the short story "Veteran's Dance." Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Luke's
cousin Lug has returned from the war feeling "disconnected from the things that made people
happy" (22). Although Lug recognizes that it is his fault that he cannot feel close to anyone
(23), when the story opens it is clear that he has been unable to do anything about his
predicament. Indeed, he tells his sister Judy that at one point after his return he felt like
committing suicide. His response to Judy's joy that he did not kill himself is telling: "Me too,
we wouldn't be having this conversation if I had gone through with it" (25
emphasis added).
Lug's statement stresses the importance of conversation as a means of establishing
connection, and therefore as an alternative to the ultimate disconnection of suicide. His
conversation with Judy, when he tells her several stories of Vietnam, is only the first of those
he participates in in order to "survive the peace." At the VA hospital he and other veterans
tell war stories in group therapy sessions, and after talking about their feelings toward the
war and their parts in it, Lug "felt like he was leaving some of his memories at the hospital"
(32).
While those conversations are
certainly therapeutic, Walking the Rez Road indicates
that they cannot take the place of being home and talking with family and a spiritual leader.
After leaving the hospital Lug tells Judy that while he thought it was helpful to go through
the Veteran's Administration program, "it felt better talking to the spiritual man" (33); it also
"feels better being here with relatives" (33). Thanks to sharing war stories with his sister, the
spiritual leader, and other Vietnam veterans, and hospital stories with his sister and the
spiritual man, Lug is able to do what he was unable to do at the beginning of the story:
participate in the communal celebration of {31} the
powwow and dance the veteran's honor song.
The cyclical structure of "Veteran"s
Dance," beginning and ending with a powwow, is
indicative of Lug's journey away from and then back to community and connection. It is also
indicative of the emphasis and importance Northrup places on cycles throughout Walking
the
Rez Road. Cycles abound in the text, and those of the natural world are indicative of
connectedness and help to highlight this truth for the Anishinaabe. In "death two," Northrup
writes that "some trees tipped over / showing us the death part / of their life cycle" (42) and
thus remind the narrator of the intimate relationship between life and death. Understanding
that, the reader can understand the playful nature of the poem's title. "Two" is Minnesota
State Highway Two, and it is also "too," for life and death and chance are all connected in
the Anishinaabe worldview,5 and "to," as the poem tacitly pronounces death to
any
perspective which fails to see the necessary connection between life and death. The reader is
thus prepared for the poem "end of the beginning," in which Northrup writes that "Death is a
part of life" and "Everything happens in cycles" (68). Recognizing this leads not to paralysis
or isolation, but to moral and social awareness and responsibility; the narrator asks "Is there
a message here?" and answers "Yah, / treat others like this / is your last day above ground"
(42). Northrup returns to natural cycles and reenforces the connection between them and the
cyclical traditional lifeways of the Anishinaabe in the final selection of the volume, whose
title, "Rez to Jep to Rez," succinctly phrases the cycle the story tracks. Luke Warmwater and
his wife Paneqwe return home after traveling to California and auditioning for a spot on
"Jeopardy" in order to finish the already gathered wild rice while birch and popple leaves are
falling and "Another yearly cycle was ending" (175).
Cycles are not confined to the natural
world and the traditional lifeways of the
Anishinaabe, however. They are a part of all life in general and Luke Warmwater's life in
particular. In "Bloody Money," a story about being so broke that one is forced to sell blood
plasma, Luke thinks about buying food with the money he'll get for his blood; he recognizes
that "This completed the cycle somehow" (45). Fortune frowns and then smiles after he
finishes the process of giving blood: Luke first gets a traffic ticket, he'd "been hooked up to
corporate America too long" (46), and then receives both an insurance check for a barely
remembered accident from several years ago and two hundred dollars owed him by his
brother-in-law. His $1,906.00 profit is "not bad for one day," but he knows better than to
think that his luck has turned for good. Rather the story closes with Luke "wonder[ing] how
long the prosperity part of the cycle would last" (46). Two stories later Luke is once again
out of work and short of cash and we are reminded that "these things worked in cycles"
(55).
{32}
Just as the story "Bloody Money"
enables the reader to see the relationship between
cycles and the traditional Anishinaabe worldview, stories within "Bloody Money" enable
Luke and his cousin to divert their attention from both a dehumanizing and impersonal
documentation procedure reminiscent of a "jail booking" and the bloodletting done in a large
"barnlike" room where there are "green vinyl beds" instead of "cow stanchions" and the
workers treat donors like "some kind of livestock" (44). Throughout Walking the Rez
Road
the characters tell stories to reestablish and accentuate connection; as often as not, those
stories elicit laughter. Luke, Dunkin Black Kettle, and Tom Skin tell stories and laugh
together while on a one-day job; Luke and Butch Storyteller "laughed and lied" (64) and told
stories on their way to a convention in Minneapolis. Judy can see Lug's "laugh lines as he
talked about the month with other vets" (33) at the VA hospital. Luke and Dolly, his ricing
partner in "Ricing Again," join "in on the laughing and exaggerating as people told stories
about what happened on the lake that day" (96). Luke and his wife Paneqwe laugh together
over the various stories centering on Luke's first cousin Ben Looking Back.
The move from stories and laughter to
humor is easily made, and it is humor that serves
as perhaps the most effective survival strategy for Native Americans in general and the
Anishinaabe in particular. The humorist's project is, as Neil Schmitz argues, "to confront
reality, to think, real is only" (4). Reality is frequently painful, of course, so humor
"transforms the effect of error, the result of wrong, and reformulates pain as pleasure" (9).
One would be hard-pressed to find a group of people in America for whom reality has been
and is more painful than it has been and is for Native Americans. Rather than despairing,
however, the first people frequently turn to laughter and humor. Vine Deloria pointed this
out early on: "When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects
of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that that
people can survive" (167). Kenneth Lincoln's thoughtful work on "Indi'n humor" reiterates
the relationship between humor and Native survival: "As expressed by survivors of tragedy,
nonvanishing Native Americans, this humor transcends the void, questions fatalism, and
outlasts suffering" (45). Consequently, humor is "their psychic wealth and long-term
salvation" (46).
Closer to home, Gerald Vizenor
emphasizes the importance of humor throughout his
work. In a recent interview he remarked at length upon the nature of humor and its role in
Native American literature and life--past, present, future:
Another kind of comedy is fairly well-established stories that intend to be tricky and comical and those are trickster stories which involve transformations of all kinds. And that can be very humorous just in itself, different kinds of transformations. {33} I argue that humor is natural, and it's healing. And it also brings people together. They trust each other more. And it's healing. And you have to know each other really well to laugh. So it's bonding in a sense too. But it's particularly healing and it's that part that I focus on. . . . And people expect a kind of liberation of humor from the mind. Playing the word "liberation" in its non-political sense, just that it's enriching and expanding, liberating. (Miller 80)
Humor, then, emphasizes and reenforces connection and community even as it transforms
and liberates teller and audience. Therefore, it is both a tool of survivance and an instrument
for change. Vizenor also indicates how the traditional lifeways and contemporary situation of
the Anishinaabe necessitate the use of humor. The same can be said for Northrup and
Walking the Rez Road. For it is when the cycle of life is canted toward trial,
misfortune, and
difficulty in the text that Northrup and his characters use humor to bring to light and make
light of the most painful aspects of contemporary Native life in order that they might
survive.
Returning to "Bloody Money" helps
us begin to understand the role humor plays in the
text. The Federal Government used and uses blood to determine the identity of those it has
historically defined as other. Such a determination runs contrary to the ways of the
Anishinaabe, at least in part, for in their worldview identity is determined first and foremost
by clan membership. Blood tells, however, according to the Government and the majority
culture, and it was one's blood that first resulted in removal to one of the reservations
established in Minnesota for the Chippewa, and then led to timber and land fraud stemming
from "illegally obtained Chippewa half-blood scrip" (Danziger 103).
"Bloody Money" also makes clear
that
blood and identity are bound up in an economic
system in which the commodification of the former works to determine the latter. Identity
transcends race in such a system, as those selling blood plasma are lumped together and can
be identified simply as "have-nots": "They all looked like people who needed ten dollars.
That was the common thread running through them. There were hippies, winos, Indians,
street people, college students, blacks, and some who defied a label" (44).
Luke Warmwater is one of the
disenfranchised, the dispossessed, but, as "Bloody
Money" indicates early on, "he was broke, not poor" (44). Both Warmwater and Northrup
have the "psychic wealth" of humor, a humor in this case neither as outrageous and shocking
as Vizenor's nor as playfully postmodern as Gordon Henry, Jr.'s is at times. Northrup uses
the narrative to spend some of his wealth of humor in order that we see the pain even as
{34} it is transformed so that the cause of the pain, the
reality of Native life in contemporary
America, can be survived. Faced with the need to get money, left with the disturbing option
of selling his blood, Luke first wonders where he can go to sell and how much he can get for
his spit or ear wax or sperm. Nowhere and nothing, but the lines are worth at least a smile as
they direct our attention to Luke's experience in the Blood Donor Center. We learn that it is
called Dr. Dracula's Bank by those forced to go there and that the workers are called
vampires. Such phrasing constitutes a complex act of transformation. The joke confers
identity upon both place and workers, and in so doing turns the tables on a situation in
which, typically, the donors are the ones being identified. Furthermore, the phrase "Dracula's
Bank" illuminates how the process of selling blood plasma turns one into the living dead,
precisely because such a commodification and economic identification of self is deadly.
Adding the title "Dr." to Dracula accentuates the painful reality of a profession dedicated to
helping and healing others having been transformed into that which here does neither. Finally,
the workers are vampires because the process turns them into the living dead as well.
Humor is also employed to confront
and transform stereotypic identifications. In "The
Jail Trail," for instance, Northrup lets us know that Natives turn to humor in response to the
stereotype of the drunken Indian. Luke Warmwater's treatment for alcohol abuse is
prefigured by the inclusion of "a story going around that the state hospital was going to
rename one wing of their facility. They were going to rename it for one of Luke's uncles
because he had been there so many times" (86). The story appears to substantiate the
prevailing stereotype: Indians are nothing more than a bunch of alcoholics whose substance
abuse and concomitant shiftlessness create a wasteful drain on the state's resources--with no
return on the investment. The story also looks squarely at reality: the majority culture is more
willing to spend money on a consequence of the problem of the Native American's place in
contemporary America than it is willing to address the problem itself. The story of the story,
Luke's reading of it as it were, makes the turn to humor, for the Sawyer Indi'ns and for us,
and transforms the pain while exploding the stereotype: "Luke thought the story was slightly
exaggerated because he had another uncle who had been there just as many times. They were
not going to name anything for him. The story was good for a chuckle though" (86).
With that chuckle echoing, we move
with Luke Warmwater through the "door of the
treatment place" in the next paragraph and into treatment, humorously prepared for the
humor necessary to survive the place. The narrative does not disappoint. It first humorously
transforms the majority culture's predilection not to see Natives as individuals by turning the
tables on the center's confidentiality rule in order to protect the identity of the skin {35} with
Warmwater at the center. It then casts the dispossessed, alienated status of the first people in
the United States of America in a humorous light by having both Luke and the nameless skin
place "their hands over their livers as they raised the flag" (88).
The Native's status as marginalized
other in their own land is reiterated in "brown and
white peek." Once again the response is humorous. Northrup writes one of the painful
questions at the core of reservation life: "The word reservation is a misnomer / reserved for
who?" (104). Who indeed. William Warren's History of the Ojibway People
indicates that
Anishinaabe have been at Fond du Lac from the seventeenth century onward. It was and is
their home. Reservation is an identity conferred upon the place by the majority culture. In his
introduction to Touchwood, a 1987 collection of Anishinaabe prose, Vizenor notes
that
Northrup's "direct and humorous stories are inspired by the rich language that people speak
on the reservation" (vii), and "The word reservation is a misnomer" (emphasis
added)
fittingly places the stress on that rich language. Northrup then offers the reader two different,
humorous, words for reservations in general and the Fond du Lac reservation in particular:
"rez" and "Fonjalack." The former is the typical Native name for reservations; the latter is a
phonetic Native phrasing for Fond du Lac. With each word speech, particularly Native
speech, is being emphasized, and such an emphasis is one of the hallmarks of humor: "In
effect, humorists must wrest their writing from proper writing, and this they do in a style that
enhances speech values and sets those values against the prescriptive values of writing"
(Schmitz 27). Northrup uses both "misspelled" signs in a line disclosing a painful truth of the
Fond du lac reservation: "The white man owns 80 percent of my rez, Fonjalack" (104). His
turn to humor makes perfect sense, of course, both because the traditional culture of the
Anishinaabe was and is predicated on the oral tradition and because the act of coopting the
word, transforming it, and making it his own enables him to address the painful issue, laugh,
and survive. Using the rich language spoken on the reservation, then, highlights how, with
language, Northrup and others have found "something good / in something grim" (104).
The relationship between language,
alienation, and humor is also articulated later in the
poem when the narrator tells us that the Rice Crispies "commods" are packaged in boxes and
cans with the labels, advertisements, and instructions in Spanish. The commodities originally
packaged for foreign consumption establish a connection between Natives and the peoples of
Central and South America that brings to light the at best dubious citizenry given the first
peoples by the Federal Government. The narrative makes light of the connection by declaring
that the "commods" offer food in addition to the free "Spanish lesson printed on every box
and can" (105); {36} here too, Northrup finds
"something good in something grim" with the joke.
Vizenor states that "The wild and
wondrous characters in his [Northrup's] stories are
survivors in the best trickster humor, no one is a passive victim" (Touchwood vii);
this is
especially true of Ben Looking Back in "Looking with Ben." In fact, nowhere in Walking
the
Rez Road is the use of humor as a survival strategy more necessary than in this short
story.
Looking Back's experiences in
Washington DC, the nation's capital and home of the
National Football League Redskins, indicate the degree to which Natives and Native cultures
have been collected and documented without being understood. Looking Back had read
about the collection of American Indian remains held by the Smithsonian and figures that
"Since they collect Indians, I decided to collect Smithsonians" (158). He gives Luke
Warmwater a present from Washington, a piece chipped from a Smithsonian museum, and
says that if each Native who goes to Washington collects a piece of the building then "we can
build our own Smithsonian, right here on the rez" (158).
Tourists are too often no better than
the worst museums; they, too, wish to collect
Indians. Ben tells Luke that tourists on the Mall asked if they could take Ben's picture. After
posing at no charge for the first dozen pictures, he starts charging five dollars per shot and
makes more than two hundred dollars in slightly over an hour. When asked his tribe, Ben
tells some that he is a Chippewa, others that he is a Sioux, and still others that he is a
Comanche. Then, in this scene illuminating the majority culture's tendency to preserve the
Native as an artifact and/or turn him into a tourist attraction, Northrup turns to humor. Ben
says that toward the end of the photo session "I was telling them I was half Chippewa, half
Ojibway, and the rest Anishinaabe. Some of the tourists were writing the stuff down as I
talked. I had a good time with the tourists" (159). What can one do when it is clear you are
not being heard, are not understood? How do you respond when people thoughtlessly take in
that you are half one tribe, half another, and the rest (the rest?) a third tribe? What
recourse
do you have when they write down without question that you are Chippewa (the Federal
Government's official designation for the Anishinaabe), Ojibway (the English approximation
of the name given the Anishinaabe by neighboring tribes), and Anishinaabe? Ignorance may
be bliss for the tourists, and for the majority culture as a whole, but how best to survive the
ignorance of a culture that has identified you without attempting to understand you? You
make a joke, find the humor, laugh in order to survive.
Pain and humor reach their peak when
Ben Looking Back goes inside the Smithsonian
and discovers the displays and dioramas of Indian history and material culture. Finding an
empty diorama, Looking Back makes a "Contemporary Chippewa" sign for the space, props
it up, steps over the {37} rope separating the audience
from the exhibit space, and strikes a
pose. The various responses are telling: some of the museum goers stop and examine the
diorama, some give strange looks as they try to make sense of the incredibly lifelike exhibit,
some do not even see Ben, and one woman takes a picture. At that moment, Ben breaks the
pose, asks for five dollars, and then steps back over the rope to leave the museum before a
guard comes.
The setting and the responses to the
Contemporary Chippewa exhibit disclose the
painful reality of how most see Natives in America, if they look at them at all. Ben's decision
to become an object of the gaze of the majority culture by crossing the boundary and creating
the exhibit is his, and Jim Northrup's, way of transforming this painful reality into something
pleasurable. He looks back at the tourists, as does Northrup, in good humor; indeed, Ben
tells Luke that he "had the most fun" (159) in the museum. The painful reality is accentuated
when Looking Back leaves the Contemporary Chippewa sign in place to designate the space
he has left. Ben tells Luke that "As I was walking away, I saw more tourists reading the sign
and looking at the empty space" (160). Earlier, in "brown and white peek," Northrup writes
that "We have TV, that window to America / we see you, you don't see us" (104). Given this
painful truth, it is perfectly fitting that the Contemporary Chippewa exhibit is, finally, empty.
The majority culture's appropriation and identification has historically been a
misappropriation and misidentification. It is equally fitting that by the time Ben Looking
Back finishes the story "Luke was laughing so hard he had to pull the car over on the side of
the road. After he settled down and wiped his eyes, he was ready to continue the ride home
to the rez" (160).
Luke Warmwater's tears of laughter
born of humor make it possible to continue.
Anishinaabe know this truth. Louise Erdrich has spoken of humor as "one of the most
important parts of American Indian life and literature . . . and when it's survival humor, you
learn to laugh at things" (qtd. in Coletti 46). Of her own people Erdrich has said that they
"have the best sense of humor of any group of people I've ever known" (qtd. in George 242).
In Laura Coltelli's volume of interviews with Native writers, Vizenor returns again and again
to humor: "You pick the moment, the second, and you want the world to change with you,
and it isn't going to do it. In fact it's going to say to you 'Too bad. Stay a victim'" and is when
you turn to humor "as an act of survival, humor as balance, and play as imagination" (168).
Bonnie Wallace, Anishinaabe writer and educator, said "We are humble people, sometimes,
but what saves us is our humor. . . . We hit bottom, laugh, and go on" (qtd. in
Crossbloods
32). That is, to close with the words of Jim Northrup, "you can't hold a good story down"
(87), because those good stories, told in all good humor, are what enable Northrup's
characters in Walking the Rez Road, Northrup himself, and--ultimately--the
Anishi-{38}naabe to survive. At the same time, they
liberate characters, author, readers, and Natives
from stereotypes and misunderstandings so that a healing change can occur.
NOTES
1"Surviva nce" is Vizenor's term to capture the nuances of Native American survival. For instance, in "Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus" he argues that "Ishi is the representation of survivance" (226) in no small measure because it is a nickname. As such, it harkens to and highlights the importance of oral tradition, community and communal stories, and memory and remembrance.
2See Edmund Danziger, esp. 91-134, for the standard historical perspective on this issue. See Ignatia Broker for the issue from an Anishinaabe perspective.
3This is also true of much contemporary Anishinaabe poetry and fiction. Vizenor's haiku and his thinking about that form highlight a text's capacity for resonance and the importance of audience and imagination. His prose, particularly at the level of the paragraph, is similarly crafted to necessitate audience engagement. Also, Blaeser writes, "I think the best poems might be nothing more than a list of names of people, animals, places, plants, sounds, seasons, because poetry is connections and these are the connections--the poetry--we all carry in our soul, the poetry that writers try to bring to the surface" (xi).
4Even those familiar with the traditional lifeways of the Anishinaabe of northern Minnesota might imagine that the last note sounded in "shrinking away" is in keeping with the philosophy implicit in the isolation families endured each winter in order to survive. The length and severity of the northern Minnesota winter, coupled with the small amount of readily available game, prohibited the Anishinaabe from maintaining their small summer villages once the weather began to turn; rather, families left the summer encampments and settled by themselves in the strong woods in order to weather the winter. While the families were by necessity self-reliant for much of the year, due to the impossibility of maintaining a village community, individual family members had to rely on each other for survival.
5The Anishinaabe creation story that opens Basil Johnston's Ojibway Heritage speaks of Kitche Manitou having a vision of the earth and universe in which he sees birth, growth, and death; chance and constancy. In a completely different context, that of issuing a call for environmental activism, Winona LaDuke emphasizes the importance of cyclical thinking to sustainable communities modeled after those of the Anishinaabeg (see "A Society Based on Conquest Cannot Be Sustained"). Also, Vizenor has been interested in the relationship between life, death, and chance. See Summer in the Spring, his interpretation of traditional Anishinaabe dream songs, lyric songs, and trickster tales, especially "Naanabozho and his Father" and "Naanabozho and the Gambler," for his articulation of the relationship. One should also turn to {39} Vizenor's novel The Heirs of Columbus, which concludes with a moccasin game between the protagonist Stone Columbus and the wiindigoo in which life or death is at stake.
WORKS CITED
Blaeser, Kimberly. Trailing You. Greenfield Center NY: Greenfield Review P, 1994.
Broker, Ignatia. Night Flying Woman. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1983.
Coltelli, Laura, ed. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
Copway, George. The Ojibway Conquest. New York: Putnam, 1850.
Danziger, Edmund. The Chippewas of Lake Superior. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990.
Deloria, Vine. Custer Died for Your Sins. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969.
George, Jan. "Interview with Louise Erdrich." North Dakota Quarterly 53 (Spring 1985): 240-46.
Ghezzi, Ridie Wilson. "Nanabush Stories from the Ojibwe." Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America. Ed. Brian Swann. New York: Vintage, 1996.
Henry, Gordon, Jr. The Light People. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1994.
Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
LaDuke, Winona. "A Society Based on Conquest Cannot be Sustained." Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice. Ed. Richard Hofrichter. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993. 98-106.
---. "Introduction." Walleye Warriors: An Effective Alliance Against Racism and for the Earth. Rick Whaley and Walter Bresette. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993.
Lincoln, Kenneth. Indi'n Humor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Miller, Dallas. "Mythic Rage and Laughter: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor." Studies in American Indian Literatures 7.1 (Spring 1995): 77-96.
Northrup, Jim. Walking the Rez Road. Stillwater MN: Voyageur, 1993.
Schmitz, Neil. Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Vizenor, Gerald. Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.
---. The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover NH: Wesleyan UP, 1991.
---. "Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus." Boundary 2 19.3 (1992): 223-35.
{40}
---. The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
---. Summer in the Spring New Edition. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1993.
---, ed. Touchwood: A Collection of Ojibway Prose. Minneapolis: New Rivers, 1987.
---. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1978.
Warren, William. History of the Ojibway People. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1984.
{41}
Irony and the "Balance of Nature on the Ridges" in Mathews's Talking to the Moon
Lee Schweninger
When he returns to live at the
blackjacks in Osage County, Oklahoma in 1929, John
Joseph Mathews (c. 1894-1979) brings with him a maxim (chiseled in stone), which he
assembles in his new home as the mantle piece: "to hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh--that is to
live" (194). Although he does not share that motto with the reader until late in the account of
his ten years on the ridges, its Westernness informs the entire book. The words, translated
from Latin, reflect a Western sentiment.1 As Mathews tells the reader, he found
the pieces of
the mantle at the ruins of a Roman "officers' club" in North Africa (194). The soldiers were
protecting Rome's imperialistic interests from the native Africans. Thus, much like the
Romans in Africa or the Europeans in the Americas, the author of Talking to the
Moon
recounts how he invades, settles, and justifies protecting his new homeland from enemies.
Characterized as a settler, Mathews,
the subject of the autobiography, becomes an
ironic embodiment of the progress of "civilization" across America and onto the land of the
Osage. According to recent theory of autobiography, one can establish that there is a
distance, a separation of identities, between the narrator and his subject (the author himself).
Not even the best intentioned autobiographer can recreate the subject as it was; rather he
must construct the subject (the self) from memory. Theorist Paul John Eakin writes that
"autobiographical truth is not fixed but an evolving context in an intricate process of
self-discovery and self creation" (Fictions 3). According to Philippe Lejeune, the
failure to
make a distinction between the I of the narrator and the subject of the
narration "causes the
greatest confusion in the problematic of autobiography" (On Autobiography
9).2
{42}
Acknowledging this distinction allays
confusion, yet it also creates the potential for
irony, an irony that lies in the space between the narrator and his subject, between the
reconstructed subject and the actual historical figure. That is, the author (Mathews as Osage,
as historical person) and the reader can perceive a clash between their own sense of history
and the narrator's account of that history. The narrator claims that he lives in harmony with
nature as he extols the virtues of hunting, yet at the same time the text itself insists that the
disruption of the balance of nature and the practice of sport-hunting cause long-term ill
effects on Osage culture and on the Osage landscape. The term irony as I use it
here
thus
names the unspoken compact between the historical John Joseph Mathews and the reader,
against the narrator (as it were) who tells the story.
The book's irony is perhaps most
poignant in two specific contexts: (1) the
autobiographical text deemphasizes the Osage heritage of the historical Mathews and his
historical involvement in Osage politics and tribal affairs during the 1930s; and (2) the text
emphasizes ways in which the balance of nature is disrupted through the building of the
house on the ridge, the introduction of domestic animals, and the settler's hunting practices.
The narrator describes his coming to live in the blackjacks, promising to maintain the balance
of nature, yet disrupting that balance at virtually every turn. In short, he plays the part of
settler in a book that decries the results of settlement.
In the context of such a discrepancy
between the historical Mathews and the narrator's
self-depiction, the autobiography takes on a function beyond merely relating a life; through
its ironic distancing it assumes the role of social critique. My contention is that the book
constitutes protest literature and that it achieves that protest primarily through irony. That is,
by exposing the complex and paradoxical life of the settler on the ridge, Mathews creates a
narrator who forcefully demonstrates the problems that the Osage face in attempting to retain
cultural distinction and survive despite the machinations of the dominant culture represented
by that settler.3
Author of Wah'Kon-Tah
(1932), Sundown (1934), and The Osage (1961), each dealing
with the history and culture of the Osage, Mathews, one-eighth Osage himself, was raised at
the Osage agency, Pawhuska, Oklahoma. After schooling at the University of Oklahoma
(B.S. in 1920) and Oxford University (receiving a B.A. in natural science in 1923), he
returned to Pawhuska where he built a stone cabin and lived throughout the 1930s. It is the
ten years at this cabin that he recounts in Talking to the Moon (1945).
Although the autobiography presents
the life of a settler, Mathews's Osage heritage
does inform certain aspects of the text. As A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff demonstrates, the
purpose, structure, and content of the book {43} are
informed not only by Mathews's
familiarity with Thoreau and Muir but also by Osage tradition and belief. Underlying the
book's structure, for example, is the incorporation of the Osage concept of duality that
consists of thought or imagination (Chesho) and war or physical action
(Hunkah).4 Robert
Warrior also notes the Osage connection, calling the book "an interpretation of the ecological
and social history of the Osage land and people" (58). Guy Logsdon further identifies the
importance of the Osage to the autobiography, noting that in it Mathews expresses unique
observations of nature through the cultural dimensions of the Osage.5
Despite the Osage connection and
Mathews's historical interest in preserving Osage
heritage and tradition, he omits from Talking to the Moon his part in Osage history
of the
1930s.6 Indeed, the narrator assiduously avoids exploring or even identifying his
own Indian
ethnicity. That is, he writes not as an Osage but as an American of Osage descent. Perhaps
this silence enables him to embody the progress of civilization unhindered by his Indian
heritage.7 Having grown up at the agency, the historical Mathews was highly
aware of and
involved in Osage concerns. He knew, for example, that in 1871, twenty-three years before
he was born, the Osage were forced to move from their reservation in Kansas, which in 1808
had been promised in perpetuity.8 They removed to Indian Territory, Oklahoma,
where they
bought land and settled in what became Osage County.9 He knew that the Osage
had fought
off allotment until 190610 and that despite allotment they retained their mineral
rights. As a
beneficiary himself, he knew that when oil was discovered, many Osage individuals and
families became
Despite Mathews's awareness of the
insidious exploitation, political conniving, racist
and even illegal actions against the Osage, very little comment shows up (directly at least) in
the autobiography. In only two specific instances does the author recall his "attending to the
business of the Osage," and even then he only says that this work took him occasionally from
the blackjacks. He describes neither the work nor the issues themselves. (See
Talking 125,
212-13.) The autobiography thus appears surprisingly unpolitical for having been written by
an extremely active member of the Osage Council from 1934-1942,11 by a man
who travelled
often to Washington DC on the Indians' behalf and who was actively involved in acquiring
materials for the Osage museum (whose creation he spearheaded). Mathews had just written
Wah'Kon-Tah, a fictional history of the Osage in the nineteenth century; while
living in his
blackjacks cabin he wrote Sundown, an Indian-centered, autobiographical novel;
and during
the 1930s he was an outspoken advocate of John Collier's Indian reform proposals. This
active, involved Mathews is left out of the autobiographical {44} Talking to the Moon, however.
Also left out is any description of the
corrupt world Mathews enters when he returns to
Pawhuska. The oil boom of the 1920s had died down substantially with depressed oil prices,
but the exploitation of the remaining wealthy Osage people continued through the
1930s.12
Mathews cites 1932 as the date the "great frenzy" ended, but he knew that the exploitation of
the Osage did not stop then. As Terry Wilson records, for example, alcohol selling stayed
prevalent, both bootlegged and legal. Use of addictive narcotics, especially morphine, was
widespread, much of it prescribed by non-Indian doctors. Using a bail/bond scam, bondsmen
swindled Osages accused of crime. Legal graft continued as the lawyers created lawsuits to
force Osage to pay fees to avoid going to court. Lawyers would represent two opposing
parties in the same lawsuit, collecting fees from both. And a disproportionate number of
thefts were committed against Osages (Underground 158). Well aware of this crime
and
exploitation, Mathews spoke out in 1935, saying that "the Osage people . . . became
industry, and flocking to them from all ends of the earth came every type of person, rats as
well as fairly decent citizens. . . . If the . . . payments were stopped tomorrow there would be
nothing here in six months, there would be coyotes howling in the streets" (quoted in Wilson,
Underground 155).
In response to the fact that Oklahoma
Indians were essentially left out of the major New
Deal policies of the 1930s, Mathews blamed "self-interested whites, especially 'that group
that have always lived off the Indian'" (quoted in Wilson, Underground
166).13 The historical
Mathews accused the politicians and journalists of being biased against the Osage in their
accounts concerning the Indians' interest in the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) which
essentially ignored the Osage.14 Despite this intense political activity and
outspokenness, the
Mathews of the autobiography is silent on that and many other such issues. In a
sense--insofar as any such generalization is valid--one can argue that the silence exemplifies
how Talking is characteristic of Native autobiography. As Kathleen Mullen Sands
suggests,
for instance, American Indian autobiography "tends to be retrospective rather than
introspective. . . . There is little self-indulgence on the part of Indian narrators" (61).
Nevertheless, as this silence makes clear, the narrator selects and omits facts to the particular
end of relaying a coherent and patterned life.
The narrator is a settler who builds his
house, introduces domestic animals, and hunts
the native animals, some to near extinction, while contending that he has returned to the
blackjacks to climb "out of the roaring stream of civilization" (11).15 The
implicit irony is that
in attempting to climb out of civilization, he brings civilization to the blackjacks.
Before he brings in domestic animals,
the introduction of which breaks {45} the truce
between himself and the other animals on the ridge, he acknowledges that he disrupts the
balance. The settler's first disruptive act is to drill a well.16 He seems oblivious to
any
disruption caused by the drilling despite his awareness of a well's adverse effects and despite
the distinct similarities between drilling for water and drilling for oil. In emphasizing how
drilling for oil desecrates Osage land, Mathews describes the spots "where holes were sunk
for oil," and he notes that "Some of these spots have been barren of vegetation for
twenty-five years." An old boiler "was like a wart on the prairie" (189). The reader thus
discovers an ironic, a complex, even a contradictory, situation. Although not mentioned in
the text, oil money enables the historical Mathews to build the very house he lives in, and
provides him freedom from work.17 He does not actively participate in the oil
drilling, but he
does drive his station wagon across the valley, without commenting that he consumes the gas
and oil that the wells littering the landscape pump for him. And he does drill for water.
The similarities suggest an ironic
parallel between homesteading and the adverse impact
of the homesteader's oil enterprise, but the drilling also implies the desecration of a grave.
Mathews finds the bleached bones of a horse from his boyhood: "I picked up two of the leg
bones and examined them. . . . I dismounted and laid them one across the other" (5). Later,
this bone cross marks the site of the well; thus, the drilling for water, symbolically, if
inadvertently, desecrates a grave even before the building of the house whose "composition
roof" remains "an alien" (17).
Despite this inadvertent desecration,
the narrator writes that he returned "to become a
part of the balance."18 He even makes his house out of area sandstone so that it
would be an
integral part of its environment: "The house with its stone colored by nature was nature's
own, and, to bear out the impression, a coyote came trotting across the ridge without even
looking up from his hunting" (17). An early encounter with a skunk in the house further
suggests the harmonious relationship of man and wild animal on the ridges. The skunk
walked into the house while Mathews sat reading; Mephitis mephitis and
Homo sapiens
simply stared at each other: "Assured that I was harmless, he went into the kitchen. . . . He
stayed so long that I continued reading for some time, then I heard his claws ticking against
the cement, and he passed on out into the yard. I got up and closed the door" (59). The
incident suggests the early communal relationship between the settler and the wildlife on the
ridge.
Despite this peaceful encounter and
good intentions, however, the settler soon breaks
his truce with his non-human neighbors: "with all my plans to become a part of the balance of
nature on the ridges, I brought conflict, after the period of a year" (60). By harboring
non-native animals, he takes on responsibility and invites struggle, arguing that he is not part
of the balance {46} anyway. A subsequent encounter
with another skunk demonstrates how
"disturbed" that balance has become.19 This time a skunk finds and destroys the
mother and
some chicks of a "fighting bird" Mathews had imported from England. When the chicken
farmer sees the skunk asleep among its victims, he retaliates: "I was so annoyed that I held
the muzzle of my Smith & Wesson to his head and emptied the cylinder, glorying in the
nauseating musk odor that hung on the heavy air of night, transforming its glory with the
sharp explosions that broke the silence of the ridge into a symbol of the mighty power of
Homo sapiens when aroused and announcing his entrance into the struggle" (65).
Disregarding his own action that seems as brutal as the skunk's, the man claims that the
skunk is the abnormal one. He writes that the skunk "need not have been the indolent victim
of my wrath, but he let his lust, that had nothing whatever to do with his necessity to survive,
lead into excessive killing and urge him to remain abnormally with his victims" (65). Even
though he admits that the introduction of non-native species had "broken the truce with
predators," and caused the skunk to behave "abnormally," he concludes this episode by
describing his feelings: "I felt that I had to assume some responsibility, that my interference
brought tragedy into my woven-wire inclosure" (66).20
Thus the irony: the settler, turned
farmer, finds himself both pained by the tragedy he
introduced and excited by the power a gun gives him. Like the white European settler, he
argues not only that he belongs on the ridge but--ironically--that he "remained a part of the
balance through [his] strength to protect [his] flocks." He claims that by breaking his truce
with nature he "achieved a greater harmony with [the] environment." At the same time,
however, he discards his dream of balance: "there is no place for dreams in natural
progression," he admits (60). This rhetoric of rationalization echoes the European settlers'
own arguments for clear cutting forests, for depleting particular game (and non-game)
species, and for Manifest Destiny.
Mathews makes this irony manifest in
his description of an incident with a blacksnake.
Discovering the snake with half its body inside a birdhouse he had built, he identifies an
enemy, and decides to protect his wards: "I had to shoot holes through the box with the
22-caliber rifle to kill the snake and, in so doing, killed the nestlings" (66). "My feeling of
tragedy is keen at such times," he writes, "but there is certainly compensation to the hunter
when the long, black body relaxes his hold and falls like a piece of rope to the ground, and
the hunter can count the hits which were effective" (67). Now become hunter, the narrator
has introduced not only conflict into his garden, but an ironic paradox as well: he kills the
nestlings to kill the snake to keep it from killing the nestlings. He disregards the fact that, like
the skunk, the snake behaved naturally in an act that had nothing to do with the farmer
personally, {47} nor his domestic critters, nor his diet,
nor his survival.21
The blacksnake episode is
paradigmatic of the irony of the settler as hunter, as
maintainer of the balance, and as preserver of Osage tradition. On the one hand he kills for
sport and considers hunting a human contribution to the balance of nature; he submits that
hunting for food recalls the active instincts of primal man. As such, hunting is not
inconsistent with his philosophy of balance. But on the other hand, one could argue, the
hunting he does is not for survival, and thus actually further disrupts the balance of nature.
Complicating the irony is the fact that Mathews himself laments the passing of individual
animals and of species. He especially decries the white hunter's practices though he himself is
an active sportsman.
Hunting for sport and the fate of the
American bison both vividly demonstrate the irony
evident in the disruption of the balance. The June chapter, "Buffalo-Pawing-Earth Moon,"
begins with this sentence: "The buffalo are gone from the blackjacks and from the head
waters of the Cimarron River, where the Osage once hunted them." From this, Mathews
continues: "they have been displaced by the white-face bulls" (75). This simple statement
recalls the importance of the buffalo to the Osage as it juxtaposes bison and range cattle.
Fully aware of the bison's historical
importance to Osage culture, Mathews devotes
"Buffalo-Pawing-Earth Moon" in large part to describing individual Indians and recounting
Osage traditions. He associates this buffalo month "with the religious and other ceremonies
of the Osage" (77), implying a connection between the near extinction of the bison and the
passing or disappearance of Osage culture.22 He describes the Osage as being
"part of the
balance of my blackjacks and prairie" (86) and connects the natural balance with culture.
Through the example of dancing, Mathews maintains that tradition is the vehicle through
which the Osage retain their dignity: "Self-esteem comes to the man pre-eminent again when
he can give expensive presents on the fourth day of the dances, and a heroic tribal or gentile
memory comes when his song is sung" (Osage 783). In Talking, he
writes that "in its dignity
and fervency the dance is still a prayer" (83). Nevertheless, he sees reason to lament:
disruption of the balance has endangered tradition and tribal memory.
Eagle-That-Gets-What-He-Wants is afraid because he "knows that his passing, and the
passing of the other older men of the tribe, will be the symbolic passing of the tribe" (89). To
allay his fears, Mathews records the old chief's life and thereby symbolically preserves the
culture he represents.
Osage religion, too, was part of a
delicate cultural balance: "Their religion, their
concept of God, came out of my blackjacks, out of the fears inspired by the elements, and it
was colored just as the animals were colored for perfect adjustment" (77). But just as settlers
disrupted the balance by {48} bringing in non-native
species, Mathews suggests that
"Christianity and mechanism" threw Osage religion into "wild confusion" (84). He links
Osage religion and hunting when he writes that "The passing of a concept of God seems to
be almost as poignant as the passing of a species" (84). The passing of tribal memory and of
religion is only part of the Osage dilemma, however: "The old men lament the destruction of
their social structure, but they are more concerned over the consequent end of the tribe as a
unit, the sudden rupture of their record, and the loss of their individual immortality" (86).
Eagle-That-Gets-What-He-Wants is concerned about what has been happening to the young
people: "Soon they will be white men and women, he says, and they will not remember very
long what the old people have said" (89). Meanwhile, as Mathews reminds his readers, the
buffalo have "been displaced by the white-faced bulls" (75).
In the context of the disappearance of
the bison and the starvation of the Osage in the
1880s, Mathews offers a vitriolic condemnation of the white hunters. "There had never been
any reason for lack of food, except that the ubiquitous white man, in his inscrutable desire to
proclaim his presence, slaughtered wild life." He then somewhat romantically contrasts the
white hunter with the Native American: "Where the Indian passed in dignity, disturbing
nothing and leaving Nature as he had found her; with nothing to record his passage, except a
footprint or a broken twig, the white man plundered and wasted and shouted"
(Wah'Kon-Tah
57). Mathews further decries white hunting practices and the slaughtering of wild life by
attributing it to the white man's feelings of inferiority, which he tries to compensate for by
shouting "his presence and his worth to the silent world that seemed to ignore him"
(Wah'Kon-Tah 57). These passages suggest the ironic, given that in
Talking Mathews
depicts himself as an avid hunter and sportsman who does his own gun-shouting on the
ridges.
Against a landscape without bison,
the
author devotes the autumn chapters of Talking
to the Moon to describing his own hunting adventures. Although he does differentiate
between hunting as necessity and hunting as sport, he himself clearly is not a subsistence
hunter. In fact, he details for the readers his eating habits which show that although he does
occasionally eat venison and bear, he has no true need for such hunted animals. He feeds
himself "artificially," he says, "from cans brought from town and food from the ranch" (60).
He offers his guests "limitless beef and beer and piles of spaghetti" (98). He also recounts the
hunting he does that is specifically not for game. Wing-shooting, for example, is "particularly
good sport" even though of the hunted doves he says that "we have never elevated them to
the status of game" (152).
The reader can see that irony exists in
the space between the narrator's enthusiasm for
the hunt and Mathews's awareness of its tragic results. In an {49} early essay, "Admirable
Outlaw," Mathews describes an outing during which the hunters' hounds finally run down
and kill a coyote. He has this to say of the victim: "As he is the embodiment of cunning,
fleetness and courage, one feels that such a death is a disgrace, and unfair to such high
courage. One attempts to forget . . . that this little wolf's long quavering howl is the very
voice of the night prairie" (264). In Wah'Kon-Tah Mathews expresses disgust with
white
men's hunting for sport. In the nineteenth century they "sneaked over the boundaries and
slaughtered deer and turkey. . . . Later when the grazing leases were given to the cattlemen,
there were no provisions protecting the game of the Reservation, and thousands of prairie
chickens and quail were killed and shipped out to market. The cowboys and the hangers-on
of the ranches killed deer and turkey simply for the sport of killing" (Wah'Kon-Tah
56-57).
Robert Warrior makes the point that
the "terms self-determination and sovereignty
connote in their most immediate sense much of the human arrogance that Mathews believed
was the root of twentieth-century problems" (101). Yet for the narrator in Talking to the
Moon, hunting for sport brings about that very sort of arrogance. Take for example Bill
Whitman. After shooting quail, he declares that the hunt has made him "feel like a god--a
pagan one of course. . . . I have a superior feeling" (182). Despite Mathews's misgivings
about human arrogance, the book chronicles a man's passion for hunting, "for the sport of
killing." This passion results in part from his Osage heritage, from need for action, from the
Hunkah of his nature. This passion for the hunt repeatedly juxtaposed with an acute
awareness of its adverse affects, however, also creates a dramatic irony. Despite Mathews's
own complex feelings concerning hunting and the elimination of traditional game, the
autobiographical character seems unaware of his complicity in the extinction of the animals
he hunts.
Hunting from an automobile or from
an airplane, the narrator argues, is good sport.
After all, he calibrates the intensity of hunting as a sport according to clean killing and its
danger to the hunter (184); therefore, he argues, shooting from an automobile is sport
because the hunter risks a flat tire and having to travel back across the prairie on foot. At one
time Mathews also thought shooting fox from an airplane to be sport (186). Such sport
reminds one of descriptions of how railroad businessmen would advertise buffalo hunting
from the train cars as enticement for prospective rail travellers.23
In the chapter "Deer-Breeding Moon"
(October), sometimes called New-Horn Moon in
response to the whitetail buck's having cleaned his antlers this time of year, the author
reminds his readers that "Unfortunately the whitetail buck is gone from the blackjacks" (157).
In the "True Hunting Moon" chapter, Mathews explains that bear hunting rivals quail hunting
for {50} the honor of the "king of sports" (174, 182).
The hunter finds bear hunting
exhilarating because it "awakens every nerve to incautious action" and recalls the human's
once having been "the delicate, thin-skinned hunted rather than the hunter" (168).
Despite this reference to primal man,
to the hunter, the book's irony is pervasive;
Mathews reminds the reader that there are no more bear. In the first winter chapter,
"Baby-Bear Moon," the hunter laments the passing of the bear: "There are no baby bears
born on the old reservation now. I imagine there are no wild bears being born in all the
former domain of the Osage" (193). Where have all the young bear gone? one might ask.
Mathews answers: "All three of us were in time to see the bear reach a tall Douglas fir just in
front of the hounds, jump around to the opposite side, and climb to the top swiftly." As the
hunters later skin this bear, Mathews wonders at the bear's "size and porky fatness" (166).
Mathews's hunting practices are
further ironic in that they lack any spiritual element.
Unlike the traditional Osage, this hunter fails to thank any spirit or animal itself for the game;
he does not offer tobacco. Traditionally, the Osage observed "religious rites . . . throughout
the [hunting] time." According to Osage tradition, "'Still hunting' was forbidden under
penalty of a flogging, and if a man slipped away to hunt for himself, thereby scattering the
herd and causing loss to the tribe, he was punished, sometimes even to death" (quoted in
Marriott 48). Yet Mathews relates how he is often alone on the prairie hunting for bear, or
deer, or coyotes.
Such hunting practices suggest the
hunter's loss of any sense of spiritual connection
with nature. For this hunter, non-human life is no longer sacred; contemporary man hunts not
from necessity but for sport; hunting is an ornamentation. Mathews's hunting, allied with
playing in that Latin motto over the fireplace, recalls one of the earliest in a series
of
misunderstandings between European settlers and the indigenous peoples. The European
viewed hunting as a sport and so assumed the Indians were not industrious; after all, they
spent their days merely hunting. The European settler did not understand that hunting was
the Native American's work. In Talking to the Moon hunting is sport, and
comparison with a
passage from Gerald Vizenor suggests its irony: the "white man smacks his law and order on
the land, possesses the earth until it can hardly breathe, and then goes hunting in the
mountains while the tribes die in his institutions" (43).
Through his hunting, his disturbing
the balance of nature on the ridges, his apparently
ignoring the contemporary political concerns of the Osage, Mathews can be seen as playing
an incredibly complex role as man and as narrator of this autobiographical account. On the
one hand he both laments and prognosticates the passing of an age, the passing of Osage
culture, a passing that parallels that of the bison, the bear, the whitetail deer. On the {51}
other hand, the settler/narrator is, throughout, an active participant in bringing about the
deaths of those bear and, indirectly, that culture. As a hunter he has killed off the bear in
Osage lands. As settler and home-builder he has disturbed the balance with his composite
roof, well, and hundred-dollar chickens. As farmer he has introduced conflict and
necessitated the killing of coyotes, snakes, and skunks. As beef-eater and automobile driver
he has actively participated in the very culture he critiques. In his opposition he has relied on
the very actions he condemns and has become victim to the very attitudes and practices he
exposes. As Osage autobiographer, on the other hand, Mathews offers a powerful critique of
Euro-American civilization, provides a glimpse of Osage culture and history, and with great
skill describes life on the ridges. By depicting himself ironically, depicting himself as one of
the spoilers, he exposes the spoilage.
NOTES
1The stones Mathews brings with him from northern Africa suggest not only the irony of his building a cabin on the ridge but also, as A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff points out, that the stones themselves have outlasted the Roman empire, an empire which finally only temporarily subdued the people. In that fire was sacred to the Osage, Mathews's building a house around the fireplace combines Western and Osage cultures.
2O'Brien, Krupat, and Wong argue there exists a Native American precontact autobiography, or expression, of one's life, whereas Krupat and Bataille/Sands in their respective works suggest that American Indian autobiography is not a traditional form among Native peoples. The latter stress the bicultural nature of as-told-to autobiographies. More helpful in the context of Mathews--who for the most part subscribes to a Western form of autobiography--are thus Lejeune, Eakin, and Olney who theorize about self-authored, written life stories.
3One must ask whether it is fair to suggest that Talking to the Moon, this "spiritual autobiography of a special period in the history of the author's life" as Ruoff calls it (5), also be deemed protest literature, especially considering that the narrator himself insists he "could never be disturbed by the struggle of social groups in America who waved ideological banners" (15). Robert Warrior thinks so. In Tribal Secrets (1995) he maintains that Mathews resists "the forces of death around him. . . . His voice of protest is not one that makes loud demands," however. Rather, by his withdrawal, Mathews moves "toward the maturity of intellectual experience and action" (Warrior 104). Warrior finds Talking to the Moon a cryptic critique of Mathews' Euro-American contemporaries.
4Mathews writes that "With his Chesho thoughts, his ornamental expressions . . . he was colored by the processes of the earth in general and by his own struggle {52} in particular" (Talking 221).
5Guy Logsdon writes that according to Mathews the Osage's "religious concepts are intertwined with nature through three principles of life: 'self preservation, the necessity of reproduction, and a Force that inspires a bird to sing for the sheer joy of singing'" (74). Carol Hunter examines Mathews's interest in Osage history in "The Historical Context in John Joseph Mathews' Sundown."
6Concerning Mathews's commitment to creating an Osage museum, for example, see "Two WPA Projects" (117-21). Chapter titles that refer to Osage names for the months, recollection of Osage stories, and descriptions of the painting of portraits to be housed in the Osage museum all show the importance of Osage heritage to the book.
7Ruoff argues that "Mathews realized that exploring his own ethnicity in this autobiography would have resulted in severe criticism from the Osages and would have undercut his efforts on their behalf" (15).
8In 1808 the Osage were forced to cede almost all of present day Missouri and almost all lands north of the Arkansas River in present day Arkansas. Seventeen years later, in 1825, they were forced "To cede all remaining lands lying within the state of Missouri and Territory of Arkansas and all lands north of the Arkansas river in present day Kansas." In other words, the Osage were asked in these two treaties to cede about 100, 000, 000 (one hundred million) acres. (See Mathews, The Osage 518 ff and Wilson, Underground 8-9.) The Little Ones were thus left with a strip of land in present day Kansas fifty miles wide and about 250 miles long, from 25 miles west of the Kansas-Missouri border (neutral land) to the Mexican territory, land promised to them for as long as they chose to live on it.
9Mathews recalls this final move (in subtle protest) by narrating a story told by Eagle-Who-Gets-What-He-Wants. In this story the Osage chief's father relates what the head men of the Little Osage think: "they say that what Government said to us is not true. They say there that what Government said to us about having our own land if we left Kansas is not true. I heard them say there that white men are coming there too. They will come like flood water on river; they will run over everything" (Talking 92).
10As Mathews points out in The Osages, allotment was unique for the Osage in that they "would hold their land intact but not communally" (773). Even before allotment, the Osage had money to buy their reservation in Indian Territory from the Cherokee; and before oil they had money from cattle grazing.
11For an account of Mathews' involvement in the Osage Tribal Council from 1934-1942, see Wilson, "Osage Oxonian" (278-80).
12Even as late as 1936 Mathews could have read an article about the Osage as the richest Indians. According to one writer, in the popular Literary Digest, for example, the Osage were 1) getting ever richer, 2) grumbling anyway about not receiving their full share of the oil money because the oil companies were cheating them out of three percent, and 3) enjoying a "prosperity such as not even their white neighbors had heard of." They enjoyed the prosperity, the author claims, even though they did not really know how to appreciate such wealth--spending it, for {53} example, on lavish homes they would not live in ("Richest Indians" 14).
13Throug h out the depression the federal government did make efforts to include Indian communities in New Deal work for the poor among the Osage. The Indian Emergency Conservation Work plan, for example, put many to work digging ditches and planting grass in an effort to curb soil erosion. As Oklahoma Indians, the Osage, however, were essentially left out of the major Indian policy making of the 1930s because of "the political connivance of Osage County's parasitic non-Indian association" (Wilson, Underground 167).
14The IRA, signed into law 18 June 1934, abandoned future allotment and allowed for the exchange of formerly allotted land. It also extended the trust period on restricted land. But as Kenneth Philp points out, Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma had exempted the Oklahoma Indians "from six important sections of the IRA. . . . These sections had extended existing trust periods, limited the alienation of restricted land, authorized the establishment of new reservations, and provided for tribal incorporation" (176). During October 1934, John Collier and Senator Thomas toured Oklahoma, stopping in Pawhuska. Thomas had opposed Collier's attempts to get the Oklahoma tribes to accept and thus benefit from the Wheeler-Howard Act (forerunner of the IRA) (See Wright, Underground 360). Collier notes that it is "not the general run of white people in Oklahoma who are fighting the bill. It's the small clique of lawyers and guardians who have profited in the past from the Indians and who hate to be separated from a nice source of revenue" (quoted in Wright, Underground 162).
15In an interview with Guy Logsdon, Mathews offered another reason for his returning to live in Osage county. He recalls that on a hunting trip in North Africa he was reminded of his youth by a group of "wild" Kabyles who surrounded his camp "joy shooting." "So I got homesick, and I thought, what am I doing over here? Why don't I go back and take some interest in my people? Why not go back to the Osage? They've got a culture. So, I came back; then I started talking with the old men" (Logsdon 71).
16As Carolyn Merchant suggests in The Death of Nature, Native Americans often objected to Western attitudes toward digging the earth. Plowing the ground for Smohalla of the Columbia Basin, for example, was analogous to tearing a mother's breast with a knife. Digging for ores was digging under her skin for bones (28). Mining is thus a form of incestuous rape. Sam Gill problematizes what he calls the mythologizing of the Native American Mother Earth Goddess, created by non-Indian writers. Mathews nowhere suggests anything as radical as what Merchant argues, yet he does seem acutely aware of the problems associated with drilling.
17Wilson argues that Osage oil production freed Mathews from seeking "gainful employment" ("Osage Oxonian" 271).
18As Ruoff points out (8), this passage clearly echoes Thoreau's description of why he came to the woods, "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach" (Walden 89).
19This scene also differs substantially from one much later in the book when Mathews again describes his troubles with the imported, H-D (hundred dollar) {54} chickens. In the "Baby-Bear Moon" chapter (December), he recounts another chicken tragedy. In this instance coyotes kill the chickens, and the narrator's response differs significantly. He deems the coyotes "sportive": "They found easy killing and had some sport. I couldn't credit them with vengeance, nor with murder, for that matter, since they hadn't killed members of their own tribe. Their emotions must have been intense and their excitement wild" (204). Mathews's relatively calm response to this particular attack on his prized chickens comes in the midst of accounts of his own sportive nature and the excitement he gets from hunting.
20One might argue that the enormity of the narrator's action is not his killing what he calls an "abnormal" skunk in a fit of rage; the enormity is in his "emptying the cylinder," in relishing in the "musk odor," in championing the human being in the struggle for survival, and in attempting to justify the action. The passage echoes Cortés' burning of the aviaries in Tenochtitlan--for no other reasons than revenge and intimidation. In "The Passing Wisdom of Birds" in Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez writes that "in a move calculated to humiliate and frighten the Mexican people, Cortés set fire to the aviaries" (196).
21In thinking of other possible responses to the blacksnake in the birdhouse, I am reminded of one of Mathews's literary descendants, the naturalist Edward Abbey, who in the "Serpents of Paradise" chapter of Desert Solitaire discovers a rattlesnake under his trailer one morning. Abbey's response is this: "--I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake" (17).
22There exists a vast literature on the history of American bison, its near extinction, and its relation to the Osage and other plains tribes. See, for example, Dary, Voget, Marriott, McHugh, Garretson, Leckie, and Burrill.
23See Dary, 85.
WORKS CITED
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Bailey, Garrick Alan. "John Joseph Mathews." American Indian Intellectuals. Ed. Margot Liberty. Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 1976. New York: 1978. 205-14.
Baird, W. David. The Osage People. Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series, 1972.
Bataille, Gretchen and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984.
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Holt, 1970.
Brumble, David. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Burrill, Robert M. "The Establishment of Ranching on the Osage Indian Reservation." The Geographical Review 62 (October 1972): 524-43.
{55}
Dary, David A. The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American
Animal. Chicago: Swallow, 1974.
Din, Gilbert and Abraham P. Nasatir. Imperial Osages. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1983.
Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
Forbes, Gerald. "Oklahoma Oil and Indian Land Tenure." Agricultural History 15 (1941): 189-95.
Garretson, Martin S. A Short History of the American Bison. 1934. Rpt. Freeport NY: Books for Libraries, 1971.
Gill, Sam. "Mother Earth: An American Myth." The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies. Ed. James A. Clifton. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1990. 129-43.
Hunter, Carol. "The Historical Context in John Joseph Mathews' Sundown." MELUS 9 (1982): 61-72.
Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.
La Flesche, Francis. Ethnology of the Osage Indian. Misc. Collections. Washington DC: Smith, 1924.
Leckie, William H. The Military Conquest of the Southern Plains. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1963.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
Logsdon, Guy. "John Joseph Mathews--A Conversation." Nimrod 16.2 (Spring/ Summer 1972): 70-75.
Lopez, Barry. "The Passing Wisdom of Birds." Crossing Open Ground. New York: Scribners, 1988. 193-208.
McHugh, Tom. The Time of the Buffalo. New York: Knopf, 1972.
Manuel, George and Michael Posluns. The Fourth World: An Indian Reality. New York: MacMillian, 1974.
Marriott, Alice. Osage Indians. Vol. 2. Docket 105, before the Indian Claims Commission, petitioner's exhibit no. 25. Rpt. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.
Mathews, John Joseph. The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1961.
---. Talking to the Moon. 1945. Rpt. "Forward" by Elizabeth Mathews. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1981.
---. Sundown. 1934. Rpt. "Introduction" by Virginia H. Mathews. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988.
---. Wah'Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road. Norman: U of {56} Oklahoma P, 1932.
Merchant, Carolyn. Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper, 1982.
Nett, Betty R. "Historical Changes in the Osage Kinship System." Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 8 (1952): 164-81.
O'Brien, Lynne Woods. Plains Indian Autobiographies. Boise: Boise State College, 1973.
Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
Philp, Kenneth R. John Collier's Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1977.
"Richest Indians: Osages Have Received $252,700,000 from 'Black Gold.'" The Literary Digest 122 (12 December 1936): 14.
Rollings, Willard H. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains. Columbia: U Missouri P, 1992.
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. "John Joseph Mathews's Talking to the Moon: Literary and Osage Contexts." Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives. Ed. James Robert Payne. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992. 1-31.
Russell, Orpha B. "Chief James Bigheart of the Osages." Chronicles of Oklahoma 32 (Winter 1954-55): 384-94.
Sands, Kathleen Mullen. "American Indian Autobiography." Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: Modern Language Association, 1983. 55-65.
Tinker, Sylvester. "What IECW Means to the Osage." Indians at Work 3 (15 September 1935): 11-16.
"Two WPA Projects of Historical Interest." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 42 (October 1948): 117-21.
Vizenor, Gerald. "Sand Creek Survivors." Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981. 33-46.
Voget, Fred. Osage Indians. Vol. 1. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.
Warrior, Robert A. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.
Wilson, Terry P. "Osage Oxonian: The Heritage of John Joseph Mathews." Chronicles of Oklahoma 59 (Fall 1981): 264-93.
---. The Underground Reservation: Osage Oil. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.
Wong, Hertha. Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Wright, Peter M. "John Collier and the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936." Chronicles of Oklahoma 50 (1972): 347-71.
{57}
Fishing at Sandy Point
Tiffany Midge
Beyond the private road branded No Trespassing,
stand trophies of rich men's wealth;
houses eyeing the occasional whale passing by,
the echo of just-gunshot seal,
and rows of crab pots, kelp beds, nets.
Across the Sound
Lummi Island floats in the distance
like a slumbering blue whale,
and from this vantage it appears a misplaced
replica of Paha Sapa's Bear Butte;
dark, meditative, vital.
It's Sunday afternoon and we've gone fishing.
Dan for Silver, and I for poems.
He casts his line, I cast mine.
Every few throws a bullhead snags the hook,
winged gills struggling like sea gremlins
desiring flight. Wannabee salmon, Dan says.
A mischievous seal pokes its head
out from the surf and yawns a belch
with our coveted salmon on its breath.
I think of Herschel at the Locks
and the blow-up doll intended to scare him.
He just kept right on eating though.
This one in the water is probably his cousin.
{58}
Dan pulls up kelp, ocean's endless tossed
salad, while I wander down the sand spit
to squat behind the pilings and crab pots.
More seals greet me;
one is headless and baiting flies,
the other is shark bitten, gouged out,
its skins and flippers sun petrified.
Further down the shore,
an ear of corn, remnant of clam bake--
a tampon applicator, remnant of moon,
broken husks of calcium,
crustacean pinchers, bull whips,
acres of seaweed, Nike sneaker,
smoothed stones, driftwood, shell keepsakes,
and even more if you care to look hard enough.
I am fishing for poems at Sandy Point,
and if Dan's luck holds we'll be reciting them
over barbecued fish and beer glasses of cheap wine.
If not, we'll be playing Nooksack Keno
and dining on pan-fried oysters and chilled shrimp
bought with an Indian discount--wink, wink.
The lure are buzz bombs and illegal hooks,
and the pole is strained against the Silver
caught on the end of Dan's line. I climb
over the barnacled wish rocks
to capture the prize with Kodak, while
envious chumps rain on the parade.
"His line'll prob'ly snap . . ." they smirk.
"It better not, that's my dinner!" I smirk back.
Moments later I'm towing
an 8-and-a-half pound Silver, long as my arm
over the rocks and into the trunk--
its sacrificial blood
trailing all the way, and I hear myself
say to the lesbian in the rubber suit,
"Use buzz bombs." As if I'm telling
her the choicest scheme
in catching a poem.
{59}
Tribute to Mary TallMountain
Jeane Breinig
In the Koyukon Athabascan language there is no word for goodbye. That's because in Athabascan thought everything is connected. From this perspective, it is easy to appreciate the indistinct line between the spiritual and physical dimensions of life. While the late Mary TallMountain has departed from our physical world, she has left behind a rich legacy of beautiful and insightful writings. Now that she is gone, it is fitting that we honor her life and her life's work, by reprinting one of her well-loved poems:
Sokoya, I said,
looking through
the net of wrinkles into
wise black
pools
of her eyes.
What do you say in
Athabascan
when you leave each other?
What is the
word
for goodbye?
A shade of feeling rippled
the wind-tanned
skin.
Ah, nothing, she said,
watching the river flash.
She looked at me close.
We just say,
Tlaa. That means,
See you.
{60}
We never leave each
other.
When does your mouth
say goodbye to
your heart?
She touched me light
as a
bluebell.
You
forget when you leave us;
you're so small
then.
We
don't use that word.
We always think you're coming
back,
but if you don't,
we'll
see
you some place else.
You understand.
There is no word for
goodbye.
Thank you Mary. Tlaa.
{61}
Reflections on Mary TallMountain's Life and Writing: Facing Mirrors
Gabrielle Welford
As Janet Malcolm says in "The Silent Woman-I," an essay about Sylvia Plath's biographies,
Imaginative literature is produced under the pressure of an inner interrogation. . . . Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistance, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts. (109)
The writer Mary TallMountain was unstinting in execution of this undertaking. Rather than
keep them locked in her heart, she struggled as a writer to make public sense of all the
conflicting threads of her life: in her case, Athabaskan, Russian, Irish-American, pagan,
Catholic, agnostic, tribal, middle class Anglo, shamanic and priestly voices all clamoring to
be heard and expressed. One cannot do justice to TallMountain's work without taking into
account the conflicts and the resolution of these conflicts in the life that forms a context for
it.
As a young child of six in 1924, Mary
TallMountain was, without warning to her,
adopted out to a middle class white family, away from her Athabaskan/Russian mother and
the Yukon village of Nulato, Alaska. She was the first child to be adopted out of the village
by decision of the Village Council. With her adoptive parents, she was forbidden to continue
to speak Athabaskan. She never saw her mother again, though she continued to write letters
until her mother's death of tuberculosis when TallMountain was eight. Both her mother and,
later, her brother (at 17 years old) succumbed to the tuberculosis that was epidemic among
Alaskan indigenous peoples.
The shock of displacement from one
world into an utterly different and not always
nurturing one was to lead TallMountain along a path that could {62} have killed her through
alcoholism or suicide and the many physical illnesses that she attributed to the buried rage
and grief she carried with her. But, ultimately, she succeeded in embracing her conflicted
changeling voices into her self, her writing, and thence out again for the benefit of others
who are alienated, convinced of their isolation, confused by a multitude of internal voices.
She specifically desired to take the material of her life and make it available to people who
might need it. She wrote in an internal conversation with the exiled child she called
Lidwynne: "From us will come some wonderful things for people we might never know, but
they'll hear us say something, and it might change life for them just a little bit, give them
some new way to think. And that's because of you and me, and how we are. How we love
each other and our folks and them, and that magic Spirit we can't see" ("Dialogue With
Lidwynne" 9).
Mary TallMountain wrote poems that
celebrate Athabascan culture, such as "Good
Grease," "Gisakk Come, He Go," and "Soogha Dancing." She also wrote stories of the
homeless and elderly poor in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, where she lived for so many
years; Catholic hymns of praise together with poems of spirit animals like "The Last Wolf,"
"Raises His Subtle Song," and "A Quick Brush of Wings." Her yet to be published novel
"Doyon" addresses the experience of a child uprooted from one culture into an alien one,
forbidden to remember or be what she was. It is in the novel that many of the voices come
together, but both the pain and the dignity of the dispossessed appear throughout her work.
Mary's poem "Schizophrenia"
explores the experience of being torn between voices:
booming
foghorns
sad
behind my squandered heart
where has the
sly
moon hidden
trifling
with her lover stars
so I burrow deeper
into the gray
maudlin buzzing caverns
poems
wander gossamer
through
shadows in my mind
out of the mazes
I
wake at evening asking
why is morning so dim
{63}
dusk flows rich as
canvas
painted in oil
by Rouault
staring
at a stranger's
gun
and into eternity
while somewhere monks
chant
gregorian masses
knives flash
blood drips in
police sirens howl
and I hear the murmured
mantras
of life
(Light 42)
Those who have heard TallMountain read her work will realize with what slow deliberation
she would have made the split between the two sides in the poem speak to each other. As she
told the story in conversation, the poem represents her literal decision between life and death.
On one side of the split, made visual in the poem, is the despair of waking "at evening asking
/ why is morning so dim," of one who stared "at the stranger's gun / and into eternity." On
the other lies healing poetry and "the murmured / mantras / of life" which come through
strongly in TallMountain's short stories, portraits like "Indin Bilijohn" that would otherwise
be despairing. "From each level in this alien culture," she says, "I reaped something to put
into my bag of laughs and tears" (Continuum last page). Mary TallMountain's
experiences
with the lost days of alcoholism and contemplated suicide vie in the poem with her strong
hope and her spirituality, the healing from abandonment and rootlessness she found in her
writing and worked to share with others.
In this day of economic nomadism
(not with a tribe of family and friends, but alone--a
dislocation so deep and abusive we have not begun to feel its consequences), TallMountain
recovered for herself and continues to offer to others a way of existing. It is a way she
remembered only through courageous acknowledgement and willingness to feel the pain of
her childhood exile and the experience of her return to Nulato fifty years after she had been
taken away. She did this with help and she passes the help on to others who need taking "into
the arms of my tall Mountain" (A Quick Brush of Wings 26, "Your Dream"
16).
In the midst of our constantly
changing, disrupted way of life, TallMountain's poem
"There Is No Word For Goodbye" is one signpost. The {64} poet never stopped working to
come to terms with, to make sense (if possible) of having left Nulato without saying
goodbye, with finding herself a stranger in both the Athabaskan and the white world. [For the
complete text of the poem, please see pages 59-60.] TallMountain, in a poem that
commemorates a moving personal experience, at the same time offers an alternative way of
understanding leave-taking, exile, abandonment. There are other ways of comprehending a
network of ties that keeps on getting broken than the one which necessitates the finality of
the word "goodbye."
When cultures are mixed together in
one person, that person may experience the pain
and difficulty of being a permanent outsider from any one culture, but, if s/he is
committed to
honesty, s/he can also know the added scope of a consciousness that leaps beyond individual
cultures. There can be not only different cultures that give one point of view, but also an
awareness that there are very different ways of looking at the world and that there is great
worth in each. Mary TallMountain recognized the advantages and difficulties of several ways
of living and allows each to speak to the others. For TallMountain and all whose
backgrounds are an international jumble, a deep richness of source material is available. One
can access vision that, though seated in the sometime pain of otherness, goes beyond
differences to the essential dignity in a human being.
This ability to acknowledge all one's
capabilities, all one's origins (including those of
being homeless, desperate, despairing), and to give each one time on the network, is an
unusual gift, one that Mary TallMountain makes the main ingredient of her art. She shows as
much compassion, for instance, in her portrayal of her dying father (although he left the
family and abandoned her to a painful adoption) in the story "Wild Birds" as she does in the
poems to her mother and grandmother and her stories about homeless men in the Tenderloin
(A Quick Brush of Wings 42).
Because of her own insistence on her
role as a healing bridge between ways of life, as
an explicator of the pain and vision of exile, it is important that Mary TallMountain not be
read only as a Native American woman writer any more than she could be read only as a
white writer because she was adopted and also educated by white step-parents. To read her
as only anything obscures the importance of the other voices expressed so strongly
in her
writing and the desire she had to write for all dispossessed people, especially children. She
was painfully aware of the way in which our society abandons and rejects children, giving
them little place to be themselves. She spent her life dealing with the difficulties of having no
place, except what she found in her own heart, that she could really call home. She gave the
resulting voice to her writing. It would be a disservice to ignore that that was what she was
doing.
Because Mary TallMountain did not
exclude voices from her play of {65} life, she
stood at a place where supposedly opposing world visions could meet. It has been difficult at
times, as Paula Gunn Allen acknowledges in The Sacred Hoop, to place her. In
The Sacred
Hoop, Allen was concerned over what seemed to her TallMountain's choice of visionary
Franciscan Catholicism over Native American spirituality. Later, in her Foreword to
TallMountain's The Light on the Tent Wall, Allen realizes that TallMountain was
fully
capable of embracing both beliefs and making her home within the transformation: "In telling
her life and the life of her faraway people, she tells all our stories; she tells our lives. And in
so doing not only affirms life, but re-creates it" (2).
In her confluence of faith, she
discussed a right way of going about all the simple
everyday acts of living, whatever faith or no-faith one might happen to be in. For instance, in
"Meditation for Wayfarers," written for a Catholic audience but existing also within a Native
American spiritual context (and acknowledging that many Native Americans are also
Catholics) she says:
How can we followers, how can anyone, not be aware of things? I remember faintly some uneasiness in cherishing a gift, a book, a new dress. Was I become worldly? . . .
But with slow enlightenment the old door so long locked swung open, and in the midst of our contemplation there appeared an earthly garden. It seems the Creator intended that we have a garden where we could enjoy "things," could bless them in giving them prayerfully to God, and could truly know they are also given to ourselves.
. . . Gathering "things" up into prayer-fragments, salting them with words from Francis, we begin to see these together composing the song of a human and fragmented life (fragmented as are all our lives) a song that connects with the Creator of all "things." ("Meditation" 36)
The multiple heritage that is the ground for TallMountain's life appears interwoven, each part
mirroring each as she integrates and folds the corners back into the middle.
To take another example of her
commitment to incorporating difference, both the
influence of the classical training TallMountain received from her adopted mother and her
Irish-American father's love of music and words appear in her use of classical allusions and in
her ear for dancing rhythms.
Letters from the Desert
to Sister at Ocean
IV
Your Dream
Ourobouros
{66}
ah stealthy the
monstrous worm of the world
in your throat
ingurgitated into
an ellipse of serpenthood
dichotomy of entrapment
together / apart
you struggle ever more
savagely until
body bowed oblate
you stare O holy carp
shuddering into eyes of basilisk
O now if I could
I would carry you little sister
into the arms of my tall Mountain
until you wake (A Quick Brush of Wings 26)
The Latinate language, the classical metaphoric imagery of ourobouros, carp, and basilisk,
and the notion of dichotomy all derive from the Old World. But coming from Mary's other
voices, the Indian, the poor, the dispossessed, is the vision of the European Old World as
nightmare against which "my tall Mountain" will do her best to guard.
It is easy to hear the dancing rhythms
that abound in:
In the Night Also
An Octet
VIII
Ultimate
You who inhabit the solitudes,
who sing in the thrusting Yukon,
who stir the breast of the snowy owl
To think that you
who paint the veils of northern light
should linger here with me
you who brood in the tundra; bud
in the small wild rose; flame
in the midnight sun-
Drift my gossamer thistledown
home
on your endless river (Continuum n.p.)
Catholic religion and Athabaskan spirituality blend with the Irish dance of words. No corrals,
but vast space of tundra seen through silk-thin petals of a wild rose. All the influences blend
to show how supremely the resources {67} of a mongrel
human being (as TallMountain
would have laughingly described herself) can be used if that being refuses to bury them.
This is what Paula Gunn Allen was
talking about when she named TallMountain a
supreme survivor. Not only did she literally survive physical disasters such as alcoholism,
cancer, and strokes, but she mustered the forces of all her forebears (both physical and
spiritual) to laugh at all kinds of death, emotional and spiritual as well, and to balance
rekindled on the edge of a tricksterish new world. Allen says in her Foreword to The Light
on the Tent Wall:
Coyote went out one day, and he encountered some trouble. He got himself in one of those situations, and he was killed. He fell down a cliff, and all that was left was his bones. But somebody came by, and he called to them. He talked them into giving him a bit of their fur, and trading their eyes for some flower petals. That was how he tricked them. Then he pulled himself together, the bones of his skeleton all came together and the bit of fur stretched out to become his coat. He put his eyes in and trotted off. He was always dying, Coyote. And always coming back to life.
In her way TallMountain is Coyote, and like that quintessential old survivor, she knows if you're going to face death, and if you're going to engage the sacred, you'd better have your sense of humor intact. It had better be mature, well formed. She plays. (Light 2-3)
That "tall Mountain," the writer who fed life onto the page and reaped it back again into life, has used the gleaning to recreate life from many deaths, as Allen says. All the separate bits of her--the eyes, the fur, the bones--tricked their way through all the near deaths until the final one-- spiritual, emotional, and bodily--that she encountered. And now, like Coyote, she lives on as a teacher--showing the advantages as well as the pain of having so much to draw on, doing much more than surviving in a world hostile to the mongrel, the dispossessed, the Other. She leads a dance of mischievous cohesion in a world where things are flying apart.
Counterpoint
For Reuel
1976
I shall float upon you
like the brown chameleon I am
sometimes blushing rose
with startlement at life
sometimes singing a tiny tune
only you can hear
{68}
as you play your magic horn
at night where people dance
always looking up
into your far green seaborne eyes
reminding you of small things
peace
silence
trees
no one else knows chameleons
and everyone will think
you had been under a tree
that day
as a brown
leaf
fell
(Bledsoe 54)
WORKS CITED
Allen, Paula Gunn. Foreword. The Light on the Tent Wall: A Bridging. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 1990. 1-4.
Bledsoe, Linda, ed. Goddesses We Ain't: Tenderloin Women Writers. San Francisco: Freedom Voices Publications, 1992.
Malcolm, Janet. "The Silent Woman--I." The New Yorker 23 and 30 August 1993.
TallMountain, Mary. A Quick Brush of Wings. San Francisco: Freedom Voices Press, 1992.
---. Continuum: The Blue Cloud Quarterly, Final Issue (1988).
---. "Dialogue With Lidwynne." ts. 1982.
---. The Light on the Tent Wall: A Bridging. UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 1990.
---. "Meditation for Wayfarers: Cosa Embodied in the Opus." The Way of St. Francis September-October 1987.
{69}
The Politics of Point of View: Representing History in Mourning Dove's Cogewea and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
Robert Holton
{81}
FORUM
From the Editors
The editors of SAIL sadly note the passing of Rodney Simard, former editor of our journal. In his years as editor, Rodney worked diligently and enthusiastically to promote Native literatures and to bring scholars and writers from diverse backgrounds and ideologies into a productive discussion of our common ground, until ill health made it necessary for him to step down and, subsequently, retire from California State University, San Bernardino. His ready smile and wry wit will be sorely missed. Good thoughts.
{82}
Calls for Submissions
AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURES AND CULTURES, PCA/ALA, ORLANDO, FLORIDA, 8-11 APRIL 1998
We invite submissions from
individuals or organized panels (3 or 4 persons) focusing on
any issue relating to American Indian / First Nation / Indigenous peoples' lives and
literatures. We especially invite the participation of Native scholars and writers.
For individual submissions: 200-250
word abstract; complete address, including phone,
and e-mail/fax if available; 30-word summary of paper; brief biographical statement.
For panel submissions: Brief
description of panel's focus; 200-250 word abstract of each
panelist's paper; complete addresses of all panelists, including phone, and e-mail/fax, if
available; 30-word summaries of all papers; brief biographical statements for all panelists.
Deadline for all abstracts:
15 September 1997. Send all submissions to:
Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson
Area
Chair - American Indian Literatures and Cultures
American Culture Association
English
Department - SUNY Fredonia
Fredonia NY 14063
(716)
792-9405
nelson@cs.fredonia.edu
{83}
SOUTH CENTRAL MLA CONFERENCE, NEW ORLEANS, 12-14 NOVEMBER
1998
Teaching Multi-Ethnic Literatures
in American Literature Classes: Choices, strategies,
experiences, problems, possibilities. How do you "survey" American literature
multi-ethnically? What works? How do various ethnic literatures work off each other? And
what do your students think?
Abstracts (paper or electronic) by
31 October 1997 to:
E
ric Gary Anderson
Oklahoma State University
Dept. of
English, 205 Morrill Hall
Stillwater OK 74078-4069
andersn@osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu
or
Shelley
Reid
English
Department
Austin
College Box 61610
900
North Grand Ave.
Sherman TX 75090
sreid@austinc.edu
{84}
REVIEWS
Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the
Myth of Scientific
Fact. Vine Deloria, Jr. New York: Scribner, 1995. $19.95 cloth, ISBN
0-684-80700-9. 286
pages.
Vine Deloria, Jr. is a professor of
history, law, religious studies, and political science at
the University of Colorado in Boulder and has published in the study of Native America for
twenty-five years. His most recent text, Red Earth, White Lies, is the first in a
series that he
will offer on "three terribly complex areas" (35) in American Indian life--science, religion,
and politics. In this first volume, Deloria "deal[s] with some of the problems created for
American Indians by science" in the "number of amazing inconsistencies in the manner in
which science describes the world we live in and the role it has chosen for American Indians
to play . . ." (35). In subsequent volumes, Deloria proposes to examine religion and the
federal relationship, respectively (36).
In Red Earth, White
Lies, Deloria posits that "corrective measures must be taken to
eliminate scientific misconceptions about Indians, their culture, and their past" and that "there
needs to be a way that Indian traditions can contribute to the understanding of scientific
beliefs at enough specific points so that the Indian traditions will be taken seriously as valid
bodies of knowledge" (60). He argues this through an analysis of the (mis)interpretations of
the role of the Indian in theories of evolution, the Bering Strait, and big-game hunting, with
special attention to the role of radiocarbon dating in establishing historical periods and
validating said theories. Deloria's conclusions that science has grossly misconstrued the
history of the world {85} and of humans, that it has
proven itself to be inconsistent and
erroneous in its claims about dates and events, that the scientist is no better than the
competitiveness and peer pressure that his/her profession demands, and that Indian traditions
have legitimate and alternative knowledge about the world have proven to be controversial
and have been received both enthusiastically and suspiciously for their method and assertions.
In respect of Deloria's scholarship and in an effort to understand the questions that Red
Earth, White Lies raises, I will pose four questions about Deloria's methodology and
conclusions.
Question #1: Deloria
makes a compelling and important call for the reconsideration of
scientific theories and their authority in understanding the origins of the world and the place
of American Indians therein. He asserts that science has misinterpreted and mythologized the
role and traditions of Indian peoples and argues that there is a need for Indian traditions to be
respected and included within scientific studies of the world's origins and records. There is a
definitive lack of theories and methodologies that allow for this kind of approach or that
respect Indian histories enough to care about considering them. For Deloria, being informed
is not enough; the scientists must now incorporate Indian traditions into their theories,
fundamentally changing their conclusions. The question for Deloria's audience is how to go
about this kind of project--especially if you are non-Indian and unfamiliar with how to
interpret Indian traditions--without falling into the kinds of intellectual colonialisms so often
characteristic of these kinds of writing practices.
Question #2: Theories of
physical evolution have argued for incrementally progressive,
incalculable, and unseen changes in the development of living beings, and social evolution has
furthered racist ideas about the role and position of indigenous peoples in that "progress."
But today, there is ample scholarship that argues for a different kind of physical evolution
that is dramatically abrupt and unpredictable as well as scholarship that has challenged the
racisms of social evolution and other scientific theories and practices.1 Deloria's review of
evolution seems too cursory, creating hegemony among scientists, theories, and their
reception and consequently underestimating the differences and contentions among
evolutionary scientists and within evolutionary theories and their reception. In other words,
aren't the facts about evolution in greater debate than Deloria accounts for and aren't these
contentions important to understanding the role of Indian traditions in science?2
Question #3: Deloria
refutes scientific claims of a Bering Strait land bridge in order to
refute claims that Indian peoples have no real rights to U.S. lands because they were merely
earlier immigrants than Europeans: "By making us immigrants to North American they are
able to deny the fact that {86} we were the full,
complete, and total owners of this continent"
(84). He is careful to show up the inconsistencies and errors in land bridge theories,
specifically working through the impossibility of such a journey, and the need for alternative
scientific theories of occupancy (81-107). My question is about how Indian traditions of
migration might be accounted for in such histories. For instance, the Lenape have an
elaborate and complex oral tradition called the Wallum Olum or Red Record which tells
about a long migration from the "north" into their traditional lands in the northeast U.S.
(similar to other Indian traditions of long journeys before settlement in ancestral lands in the
U.S.)3 Is there a way that traditional Indian
migration stories and contemporary sovereignty
land claims can be shown to be compatible as histories of residency and rights to lands within
the U.S.?
Question #4: I have a
great respect for Deloria's scholarship for its invaluable
contributions to American Indian studies. This text read differently for me than his others. It
seemed to me that his argument was too polemical. For instance, he writes:
Academics, and they include everyone we think of as scientists except people who work in commercial labs, are incredibly timid people. Many of them are intent primarily on maintaining their status within their university and profession and consequently they resemble nothing so much as cocker spaniels who are eager to please their masters, the masters in this case being the vaguely defined academic profession. . . . Scientists and scholars are notoriously obedient to the consensus opinions of their profession, which usually means they pay homage to the opinions of scholars and scientists who occupy the prestige chairs at Ivy League and large research universities or even dead personalities of the past. (42-43)
Deloria makes like
generalizations throughout the book about who scientists are and
their loyalties to one another, their profession, and their theories. Again, it seems that
Deloria's approach insists on a hegemony within science when there is contention and
disagreement. My question is whether the approach is too polemical, and if so, will it be too
easily dismissed for generalizing complex relationships between science and Indian traditions
and the role of Indian traditions in science?
With those questions asked, let me
conclude by restating that I think Deloria's Red
Earth, White Lies is important precisely because "there needs to be a way that Indian
traditions can contribute to the understanding of scientific beliefs." I think his call for the
reconsideration of scientific claims such as those found in theories of evolution, the Bering
Strait, and big-game hunting, and practices such as radiocarbon dating, is compelling and
important and needs to happen. It's work that matters because of the way {87} these specific
sciences have been used to position Indian peoples in histories that undermine and dismiss
their knowledge. For all of us working under the assumption that indigenous histories and
traditions are significant and meaningful to science, religion, and politics, Deloria's text will
no doubt be a valuable resource as will his forthcoming volumes.
NOTES
1See, for example, Robert E. Bieder's Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1986) and Sandra Harding's edition of The Racial Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993).
2I also wonder about indigenous people's work within the disciplines of physical science. How does it invite or oppose scientific theories and practices concerning how the world came to be?
3See for instance The Red Record: The Wallum Olum, the Oldest North American History, translated and annotated by David McCutchen (Avery Publishing Group, 1993).
Joanne Marie Barker
The Legacy of D'Arcy McNickle: Writer,
Historian, Activist. Ed. John
Lloyd Purdy. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996. $29.95 cloth, ISBN
0-8061-2806-2. 264 pages.
The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Ed. T.
Lindsay Baker and Julie P.
Baker. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996. $24.95 paper, ISBN
0-8061-2859-3. 544 pages.
"I am what we colored people call
a 'native.' That means that I didn't come into the
Indian country from somewhere in the Old South after the War like so many Negroes did,
but I was born here in the old Creek nation, and my master was a Creek Indian. That was
eighty-three years ago, so I am told." Thus begins the narrative of Mary Grayson, a resident
of Tulsa, Oklahoma and eighty-three years old at the time of her interview in the summer of
1937. This is just one of one hundred and thirty Oklahoma freedmen's narratives gathered
from African Americans who had been born into slavery. These people shared the stories of
their lives with field workers from the Oklahoma Writers Project over a three-year period in
the mid-1930s.
Twenty-eight of the 130 informants
were in servitude as slaves of members of the
Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, or Choctaw nations who had taken from the Euro-Americans
the practice of black slavery. When {93} expelled from
their Southeastern homelands, they
took with them their slaves to Indian Territory. These insightful, detailed, inside views of
slavery among the American Indians provide a look into a time many people simply ignore or
are not aware of. The remaining 102 narratives come from people who were held in bondage
in other states, moving with their masters to Oklahoma soon after the opening of the territory
to settlement by non-Indians. Although American Indians had a reputation for showing more
humanity to their slaves than whites, these narratives give a broad range of relations between
all groups.
Haunting, oftentimes poetic accounts
("Next thing we knowed they was Confederate
soldiers riding by pretty nearly every day in big droves") of memories during rumors of the
Civil War, through the actual fighting, and the freeing of the slaves afterwards, give readers a
chilling account of a time when any man with enough money and who so desired, was able to
actually own the lives of others. Common threads of hurt, dedication to masters (probably
spurred by the interviewers who were white), and a belief in the power of strong prayers
weave together these narratives.
Accounts of the Pin Indians (the
Cherokee secret society that opposed Cherokee
ownership of slaves as well as other elements of Euro-American society) show that not all
American Indians were in favor of slavery. The factional discord caused by some Indians
backing the South, and still others the North during the Civil War, makes for a very
interesting aspect of the narratives. After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in 1865,
American Indians were forced to negotiate new treaties with the U.S. government, which
insisted that they make their slaves full legal members of the tribes. Four of the five so-called
"Civilized Tribes" complied; the Chickasaws refused to accept their former slaves as tribal
members.
Highly emotional reading, The
WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives takes the reader into a
time that exists only in memory. Educational yet disturbing, this collection is recommended
for anyone who desires to know more about the truth surrounding slavery than traditional
history books have presented over the years.
MariJo Moore
{94}
Completing the Circle. Virginia Driving Hawk
Sneve. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1995. $20 cloth, ISBN 0-8032-4226-3. xvi + 119
pages.
When she was a child, Virginia
Driving Hawk's family left their home on the Rosebud
Indian Reservation for a summer vacation in the Black Hills. At one point they stopped for
gas and she ran behind the station, where she encountered three privy doors: men, women,
indians. Back on the road, she told her parents about her discovery, commenting: "Isn't it
nice that there was a special place for Indians?" Years later, having learned more about the
racial bigotry that permeates American society, Sneve learned that she had to create her own
"'special places' because no one else would provide them" for her (95). This personal account
of her family history is one of those special places.
Completing the Circle is
Sneve's affectionate chronicle of her family, focusing especially
on her paternal grandmother and a maternal great-grandmother, along with other female and
male relatives who nurtured her. The title refers to the recent Dakota/Lakota tradition of
quilting; Sneve suggests the star quilt as a metaphor for the way an individual life develops as
an expanding circle, pieced together by family relationships and storytelling. This book was
conceived at a family Christmas gathering in 1988, where Sneve and several female relatives
decided to create a "picture book" of heirloom photos, and Sneve volunteered to compile a
brief family history to accompany the album. What followed in her attempt to flesh out family
records and stories involved several years of research, collecting historical data from
published sources as well as unpublished manuscripts, archival materials, and interviews with
relatives. Sneve has attempted to synthesize this information in her narrative, with mixed
results; in the course of her research, she encountered significant gaps in information about
Dakota/Lakota women, and she admits that "this great lack of knowledge made me feel
incomplete" (xii).
The book is organized in five
chapters: two centered on her grandmother and
great-grandmother, two chronicling family history on the Santee {95} and Rosebud
reservations, and a concluding chapter detailing Sneve's own childhood recollections. The
first two chapters offer a meandering patchwork of memoir, storytelling, ethnography, and
history; each begins by describing the centrality of a maternal ancestor and her use of story as
an educational tool, then moves to a broader discussion collecting various insights from
Sneve's historical research. The remaining chapters are structured in a more straightforward
chronological fashion, weaving together the several branches of the family until Sneve herself
appears on the scene. The main flaw in this book is the organization of the text, which
maintains a readable voice but never establishes a unifying narrative purpose beyond Sneve's
desire to document her family's history. And although she clearly wants to challenge the
Eurocentric interpretations of gender relations commonly advanced by both patriarchal
scholars and their feminist critics, Sneve does not adequately problematize the Western
categories of marriage and kinship, racial and religious identity, and historiography that she
relies on throughout her narrative.
The primary value of this book lies in
passages offering an intimate portrait of
reservation life during the first half of the twentieth century, including interesting references
to the important Episcopal women's collective Winyan Omniciye, employment opportunities
provided by the Indian WPA, and a Depression-era dance band (led by Sneve's Episcopal
priest father) called "Chief Crazy Horse and the Syncopators." In her depiction of
Dakota/Lakota churches, Sneve interprets religious adaptation by emphasizing functional
continuity despite changes in form, while also pointing out the unpredictable persistence of
some traditional Dakota/ Lakota forms within these Christian communities. I was particularly
struck by how many times (at least seven, by my count) Sneve recounts important family and
community events that happened at Christmas, with no apparent mention of Easter or other
religious or national holidays, a narrative pattern that may very well reflect a distinctively
Dakota/Lakota theological interpretation of Christian history.
James Treat
{96}
Bone Game. Louis Owens. American Indian
Literature and Critical
Studies Series 10. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1994. $19.95 cloth, ISBN
0-8061-2664-7. 243 pages.
Tricksters in Native American
thought often include the gambler and skinwalker.
Traditionally, the character of the gambler appears in order to test a person, who must play
and win a life and death game so that the individual (specifically) and the tribe (generally) will
survive. And, according to anthropologist Larry Sunderland (500 Nations), a
Navajo
skinwalker ostensibly inserts a bone into a victim's body without breaking the skin. This
action often results in mental and/or physical injury, illness, and death. The bone can only be
removed ceremonially by a singer (hataali); both the gambler and skinwalker are
shapeshifters. During the Morning Star Ceremony, which is demonstrated in Bone
Game and
was ended by Metalsharo (Pawnee) in 1813, a maiden's body would be painted 1/2 black and
1/2 white, staked to the ground, and shot full of arrows in a Dionysian ceremony. Owens
delicately intertwines these three ceremonies and figures in a story filled with action, mystery,
and surprises.
Similar to the traditional gambler,
who collects scalps and hands of victims, Bone Game
opens with the students and faculty at the University of Califorina at Santa Cruz (where
Owens taught Native American literatures) in a frenzy because the head and hands of
students have started to wash up on a nearby shoreline. The plot is further complicated
because the protagonist, who suffers from "ghost sickness" (96), must stop his slow
alcohol-induced suicide before he can face his destiny and stop the murders. This protagonist
in Bone Game, Dr. Cole McCurtain (Choctaw/Irish, middle-aged, survivor's guilt,
divorced),
is the unwilling and unknowing hero who must confront the gambler/trickster/skinwalker.
Although Cole seems aware of the magnitude of what he must do, his traditional family
rushes to assist him because, as the medicine man Luther states, "This story's so big Cole
only sees a little bit of it" (79).
Gerald Vizenor, the academic
trickster, states that "that game, the four ages of man
[and woman], continues to be played with evil gamblers in the {97} cities" (Interior
Landscapes 180), and similarly, throughout his text, Owens implies that this mortal game
is
still being played.
In Bone Game the
trickster/gambler/skinwalker is both literal and mythical in this text
where Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee/Irish) has the past and present, dreams and waking, real
and surreal, and natural and supernatural exist simultaneously. Owens's text is easily
accessible to both Indian and non-Indian alike, and he effectively grabs his readers and shakes
them into a realization (shared by Mikhail Bakhtin) that myths and everyday reality exist
simultaneously--maybe we had better start listening.
Julie LaMay Abner
{98}
CONTRIBUTORS
Joanne Marie Barker (Lenape) is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on indigenous sovereignty and identity politics.
Jeane Breinig is a Haida enrolled in the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska and of the Taaslanas Raven Brown Bear Clan. She recently received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington and is now Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage where she teaches composition, American, and Native American literatures.
Mace J. DeLorme is Paiute and Pit River on his mother's side and Cree and Dakota on his father's. He is a candidate for the Masters degree in social work at California State University, Sacramento and he specializes in group work with Native Americans. He enjoys the powwow highway and singing for the dancers.
Donovan Gwinner is a Ph.D. student in the English Language and Literature program at the University of Arizona. His studies have focused on American literatures, especially Native American literatures. Other interests include poststructuralist critical modes, especially postcolonial theory and criticism.
Roseanne Hoefel is an associate professor of English at Alma College in Michigan, where she co-founded the Women's Studies program. This essay evolved from her participation in the 1994 NEH Summer Seminar in American Indian Literatures with LaVonne Brown Ruoff. Recently a Fulbright lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, her upcoming sabbatical research interests include Caribbean literature and a post-colonial analysis of gender in contemporary Native American women's writing.
{99}
Robert Holton has studied at St. Mary's University (Halifax, Canada),
University of London
(London, UK) and McGill University (Montreal, Canada) where he received his Ph.D. in
1990. He has published on a variety of subjects including Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, and
Thomas Pynchon. Jarring Witness, a study of fiction and the representation of
history, was
published in 1995. He teaches and chairs the English Department at Okanagan University
College in Kelowna, B.C.
Sidner Larson, a member of the Gros Ventre tribe of northcentral Montana, is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon, specializing in American Indian Literature.
Chris LaLonde, an Associate Professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan College, has published essays on Louis Owens' Wolfsong and on teaching Native American literatures, both in SAIL. He is the author of William Faulkner and the Rites of Passage as well as essays on Faulkner's work, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and American folklore and culture.
Andrew McClure is currently completing his dissertation on Native American literature at the University of New Mexico. He has previously published articles on Gerald Vizenor and James Welch, and he has an article forthcoming with MELUS on Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's autobiography, Life among the Piutes.
Tiffany Midge (Standing Rock Sioux) is the author of Outlaws, Renegades & Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review P, 1996), the recipient of the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Prize. She has been published in Reinventing the Enemy's Language edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird; Blue Dawn, Red Earth (Doubleday/Anchor, 1996); Blue Mesa Review, Poetry Northwest, and others. She has also authored a children's book, Animal Lore and Legend: Buffalo (Scholastic Inc., 1995).
MariJo Moore, of Eastern Cherokee, Irish, and Dutch ancestry, resides in Asheville NC. She is the author of Returning To The Homeland: Cherokee Poetry And Short Stories (1994) and Crow Quotes And Stars Are Birds And Other Writings (1996).
Lee Schweninger is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he teaches courses in American Indian literatures and coordinates an undergraduate minor in Native American Studies. He has recently published essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, {100} Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich.
James Treat is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses in Native American history, culture, philosophy, literature, critical theory, and contemporary life. Treat earned the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Religious Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California (1993). He is the editor of Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada (Routledge, 1996). His tribal heritage, on his mother's side of the family, is Creek/Cherokee, and he is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma; his father's family is from the rural Ozarks of southern Illinois.
Gabrielle Welford, mother of Annie (10) and Tolemy (8), is studying for her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. When she has time, she is also a writer of fiction and poetry and has just ended a year as President of the Hawai`i Literary Arts Council.
Craig S. Womack (Creek-Cherokee) has contributed short stories to two recent anthologies, Earth Song, Sky Spirit: Short Stories of the Contemporary Native American Experience (Doubleday, 1993) and Blue Dawn, Red Earth: New Native American Storytellers (Doubleday/Anchor, 1996), and to the "Native Literatures" special issue of Callaloo (University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins UP, Winter 1994). After earning the Ph.D. degree in English at the University of Oklahoma, he taught Native Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He currently teaches Native Studies at the University of Lethbridge.
Contact: Robert Nelson
This page was last modified on: 10/19/00
