Refiguring Indian Blood through Poetry, Photography, and Performance Art

ELIZABETH ARCHULETA         

One of the most provocative issues facing American Indians today concerns the competing definitions of Indian identity.¹ Significant questions asked about identity include, Are there characteristics associated with Indianness? Does Indian identity originate from genetics or from cultural affiliation? Finally, Is Indian identity static, or can it change? American Indians and non-Indians have defined Indian identity through law, biology, and culture. All three overlap in specific ways, but more significantly, all have ties to outdated blood quantum standards associated with nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury theories of race. While the dominant culture has largely discredited and discontinued the use of the "one-drop rule" historically used to determine a legally codified African American identity, Indians and non-Indians alike continue to foreground blood as the standard for determining American Indian identity.
        Blood quantum standards divide and alienate American Indian communities and perpetuate a colonial discourse that promotes internalized self-hatred, alienation, and fractionation. This internalized oppression appears in the work of mixed-blood authors Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna/Sioux/Lebanese) and Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene). At the same time, other full- and mixed-blood poets and artists such as Elizabeth Woody (Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama/Pit River/Navajo), Teresa Iyall-Santos (Coeur d'Alene/ Yakama), James Luna (Luiseño/Diegueño), Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinabe/Irish), and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole/Muskogee/ Diné) create oppositional models of representation that challenge {2} current paradigms of Indian identity and, at the same time, challenge Indigenous audiences to create alternative understandings of what it means to be Indian. They use their poetry and photography, as well as their own bodies, to create images that either refigure the binary of blood and identity that adds up to "Indian" or reinforce the strength of multifarious Indian identities that cannot be measured by blood.
        In Paula Gunn Allen's poem "Dear World," a mixed-blood identity causes internalized oppression and racial self-loathing that manifests itself through an illness that is figured in physical, mental, and spiritual terms. Allen's poem illustrates how blood quantum standards tend to promote internalized self-hatred, forcing the mixed-blood person to blame herself or himself, rather than the vagaries of history and prevalence of non-Indian violence against Indians, for the effects of internalized racism. In the poem, a daughter talks to her mother, who has lupus, about what the mother feels is a connection between her mixed-blood status and her illness. The mother describes lupus as "a disease / of self-attack," similar to "a mugger" who breaks into "your home," and when the police arrive, she tells her daughter, "they beat up on you / instead of on your attackers" (56). In medical terms, lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks normal tissue. In other words, one's own immune system fights itself, literally setting one's own body on fire by creating inflammation as a protective process designed to eliminate a foreign body and protect itself. The daughter recognizes the logic in her mother's analogy. She tells her mother,

that makes sense.
It's in the blood,
in the dynamic.

The daughter realizes,

A halfbreed woman
can hardly do anything else
but attack herself,
her blood attacks itself. (56)

{3} She believes, "There are historical reasons for this [the blood attacking itself]" (56). While the daughter positions her mother's illness in a historical context, she also implies that her mother has learned to hate herself, which explains why she "can hardly do anything else but attack herself."
        The history of white-Indian relations is written in the blood of the mother's body, exhibiting itself as physical illness and dysfunction. The narrator unites illness and history through blood whose "Indian" side inevitably attacks a foreign intruder, meaning the white, Euramerican blood contained in her mother's body, a foreign blood that has colonized and assumed power over the "Indian country" that is her mother's body. The dominant culture's construction of and American Indians' tendency to adopt "authentic" Indian identity based on blood quantum standards leave the mother unable to "make peace / being Indian and white" (56). Her racially mixed body no longer signifies clearly within either system of identification, which leaves a question about how her being is constituted. Conflicting definitions of self render her invisible, because, she says, her blood's varied strains "cancel each other out. / Leaving no one in the place" (56). No one accepts her as white or as Indian, leaving her to feel that she is "attacked by everyone," and thus, her body becomes "conquered, occupied, destroyed / by her own blood's diverse strains" (56). The rhetoric the mother uses to describe her illness grounds it in historical violence and social injustice against American Indians; yet, she still blames herself for circumstances beyond her control.
        The poem's framing of blood quantum also focuses on metaphors of invasion and attack. Using the language of war and colonization provides the daughter with a model for helping her understand the devastation her mother has experienced as a mixed-blood woman. Her mother's body cannot make peace with itself, a statement reflecting Indigenous peoples' ongoing struggles with the United States. At the same time, her use of war metaphors also serves a political function. To say that her mother's body is conquered, occupied, and destroyed implies that enemies with battle plans and strategies for victory must exist, which begs the question, Who is the enemy and what {4} are their plans? In the United States' attempt to rid itself of Indians, Washington bureaucrats devised and legally codified blood quantum standards as a psychological strategy for relocating inside Indian bodies the legal, physical, and politics wars between Indians and the federal government. Allen's narrator has no answers for resolving the problem of blood quantum. She merely shrugs her shoulders and says,

Well, world. What's to be done?
We just wait and see
what will happen next. (56)

By framing blood quantum through dialogue, analogical matrices, and metaphors, Allen's poem demonstrates an alternative to the already recognized and studied cultural frameworks for interpreting and understanding mixed-race identities among American Indians.
        Like Allen's narrator, the narrator in Sherman Alexie's "16/13 " imagines mixed-blood identity in tragic terms with a bit of trickster humor. However, rather than imagine mixed-blood identity as an etiology for illness, Alexie's poem examines the potential negative consequences of blood quantum standards. He envisions a fractionated identity as a condition that can result in self-inflicted violence. The poem's narrator writes,

I cut myself into sixteen equal pieces
keep thirteen and feed the other three
to the dogs. (16)

Alexie creates a comic image, pointing to the absurd way blood quantum forces us to view people as fractions some of which can be tossed out or fed to the dogs. With a fractionated identity, the narrator cannot envision himself as whole and complete. He keeps a part of himself and allows the dogs to consume those that are presumably scraps, bits and pieces perceived as expendable.
Rather than imagine a mixed-blood identity through metaphors of war and foreign invasion as in Allen's poem, Alexie's narrator creates scenes of alienation and division. He explores the division of {5} identity literally through mathematics as he explains how his body became fractionated. He says,

It is done by blood, reservation mathematics, fractions:
father (full-blood) + mother (5/8) = son (13/16).
It is done by enrollment number, last name first, first name last:
Spokane Tribal Enrollment Number 1569; Victor, Chief.
It is done by identification card, photograph, lamination: IF
FOUND, PLEASE RETURN TO SPOKANE TRIBE OF INDIANS,
WELLPINIT, WA. (16)

When blood, an enrollment number, and an identification card become the major signifiers of Indian identity, the person behind these signifiers becomes displaced, lost among a host of meaningless numbers and cards meant to validate his Indian identity. The human that gets lost behind the fractions and mathematical calculations of reservation math verified on identity cards pleads to be returned to his community if found.
        Alexie critiques reservation math as a method for determining identity because it results in an equation that, literally, does not add up correctly.² Therefore, the narrator implies that relying on abstract numbers to determine identity requires rethinking if we are to find a correct answer to the perceived problem of mixed-blood identities. The narrator ends by reminding us, "We are what we take" (17), meaning, we have the power to choose or to reject fractionated selves and identities handed down to us through reservation math with equations that always add up to wrong answers. Alexie's poem suggests that blood-quantum identities almost always create a partial rather than a whole person with some parts perceived as holding less value than other parts.
        While many would not typically consider Alexie a mixed-blood Indian, no one has yet considered the alternative definition of mixed-blood status that Alexie makes obvious in his poem. "Mixedblood" is typically understood to mean a mixture of Indian and some other racial group. Yet, we should not consider Alexie, Woody, {6} Iyall-Santos, and Tsinhnahjinnie as full-blood despite the absence of non-Indian blood in their background. Woody and Tsinhnahjinnie recognize their mixed Indian blood heritage and the similar restrictions or limitations it places on them in that their mixed-blood status determines what positions they can occupy or responsibilities they can assume within each community to which they belong. Such a definition of mixed-blood status challenges the traditional way of defining the term. Likewise, much of the newer scholarship on blood quantum asks us to challenge current methods for defining Indian identity.
        American Indian artists are using art and language as a form of activism to critique dominant discourses that dictate blood quantum as a presumed truth or reality of Indian identity and to suggest other possibilities for creating and thinking about what constitutes identity beyond blood measurement and admixtures.³ Eva Marie Garroutte concludes her book Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America by leading us back to our own cultures, which she claims contain resources for creating or recovering more meaningful definitions of identity. Adopting a phrase from one of her research participants, Mashpee cultural firekeeper Ramona P., Garroutte reminds us that all tribal nations have what Ramona P. refers to as "Original Instructions," or directions that concern relationships with humans and non-humans (115). Asking us to return to proper relations because it is tantamount to Indigenous identity construction, Garroutte concurs with Vine Deloria Jr., who says,"The task of tribal religion [. . .] is to determine the proper relationship that the people of the tribe must have with other living things and to develop the self-discipline within the tribal community so that man [sic] acts harmoniously with other creatures" (88). Woody,Iyall-Santos,Baker, Luna, and Tsinhnahjinnie turn to art as a form of cultural intervention and a tool to survey proper relations, employing language, image, and body as object and subject of inquiry to explore identity issues. Their art intervenes into dominant representations of "Indianness" in ways that destabilize the fictions constructed in a colonial paradigm that posits "blood-as-truth" about Indian identity.
        Elizabeth Woody's poem, "Translation of Blood Quantum," re-{7}calls her own community's Original Instructions as a way to recover a traditional definition of identity that re-examines and re-interprets numbers.⁴ She discredits the fiction of reservation math Alexie critiques and provides a new way of thinking about numbers or identifiers attached to Indian identity that unite rather than divide. The narrator begins her math in much the same way as Alexie, listing the fractions that make up who she is: "31/32 Warm Springs -- Wasco -- Yakama -- Pit River -- Navajo / 1/32 Other Tribal Roll number 1553." These fractions add up to a correct answer; thus, she is rewarded with an "other" identifying number, a tribal roll number. According to Joanne Barker, "making indigenous people 'governable' by roll or certificate or blood allows the United States to reinvent its power to govern indigenous people as citizens 'of a particular kind' -- as those who can be enrolled, recognized, qualified, and eliminated" (32). With her tribal roll number, Woody's community and the federal government recognize her as having enough "Indian blood" to "authenticate" what she is -- an Indian -- allowing her to claim one or two parts of her mixed-blood identity.
        Nonetheless, Woody reconfigures the equation that makes her a "particular kind of citizen" that the United States accepts and recognizes, thereby rejecting the implication that outsiders have the authority to enroll, recognize, qualify, or even eliminate her, effectively canceling out her identity through blood in much the same way that the identity of the mother in Allen's poem feels nullified. Woody accepts a number, but she chooses the denominator, the fraction's bottom number, which indicates into how many parts the whole is divided. She refuses the division of self that goes along with a fractionated or mixed-blood identity embodied in the numerator, the fraction's top number. Equally, she rejects the meaning of a fraction that divides her into pieces, leaving her identity fragmented. Instead, she recreates reservation math and comes up with a new way to read numerical identifiers, boldly claiming that she is "THIRTY-SECOND PARTS OF A HUMAN BEING," not a measurement or fraction of blood.
        Woody's essay "Voice of the Land: Giving the Good Word" alludes to Indigenous peoples' historical and ongoing intermingling and intermarrying that existed before colonization. From this history, she gath-{8}ers together the fragments of her mixed-blood identity -- Warm Springs, Wasco, Yakama, Pit River, and Navajo -- and adds more detail than her poem provides. She states, "I am a descendant of the Wishram, Wasco, Watlala (usually known as Cascade), and Pit River tribes on my maternal grandfather's side. On my maternal grandmother's side, I am Tygh and Wyampum. From my father, I am Diné and born for the Tódích'íi'nii" (152). To these she adds the possibility of English, Hawaiian, and Spanish ancestry. Blood quantum identity ignores this history of interrelations, oftentimes forcing one to choose a single identity and history rather than claim multiple ancestries and histories. Although blood quantum standards make Woody eligible to claim membership and enroll in the Navajo Nation, she chooses to align herself with the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, because her maternal ancestry has resided in Oregon for five generations. Moreover, Woody confesses that she "cannot claim a voice within [her multiple] ethnic literatures, communities, and cultures," because, "like most U.S. citizens, [she has] a tenuous connection to several perspectives and land bases" (152). She recognizes her proper relations as having been established in a particular geographical location, and since a tribe's worldview and language derives from the land, her family's historical residence in Oregon makes that landscape home for her. Therefore, land and community, not blood, form the primary basis of her identity.
        To establish how her worldview and identity have grown out of the landscape and history of Oregon, Woody again re-configures the fractionated part of her identity to include much more than that which runs through her veins. Her identity also encompasses a geographic space that contains clouds, rainbows, language, animals, stories, philosophies, religion, song, and more. Additionally, this space includes "The People," a unified rather than a fractionated or divided "We," who, she says,

are watched over
by the mountains, not Man, not Monarchy,
or any other manifestations
{9}
of intimidation by misguided delusions of supremac
over the Land or beings animate or inanimate. (152)

The totality of that which her homeland encompasses informs her identity, not fractions of blood that should, according to the proponents of blood quantum, add up to a certain number in order for her to claim a relationship with the landscape on which she resides. Identifying herself as a member of the Nusoox community rather than a divided and isolated individual, Woody claims,

We kept peace. Preserved and existed through our Songs,
Dances, Longhouses, and the noninterruption of giving Thanks
and observances of the Natural laws of Creating by the Land
itself. (152)

Her use of "we" and "our" establishes her place within this history. Through natural law the land created her and her people; they were not created by strategies of blood quantum devised by bureaucrats to undo the Nusoox and separate them from the land and each other.
        Like Ramona P., Woody also uses the term "Original Instruction," or "Voice of the Land" (153) to describe proper relations the Creator established for her people. For her, blood quantum standards are corrupting Indigenous peoples' identity and their proper relationships with each other. She reminds Columbia River Plateau societies about the future and potential threat that imperils tribal nations that rely on blood quantum by asking,"If descendants are ineligible for enrollment because of the fragmentation of blood quantum, who will receive the reserved rights of our sovereign status?" (153-54). She charges Warm Springs people to return to their Original Instructions characterized in the saying "Tee-cha-meengsh-mee sin-wit ad-wa-ta-man-wit," which she translates, "At the time of Creation, the Creator placed us on this land and gave us the voice of this land, and that is our law" (166). Woody alleges that deferring to blood quantum standards defers to another law -- western law -- devised by a non-tribal government to rob Indigenous peoples of their lands and identities. Woody's poem and essay critique the over-determined operation of blood in forming {10} identity, which she corrects by reconfiguring her identity to include Nusoox Original Instructions and law.
        Like Woody, Teresa Iyall-Santos rejects an Indian identity defined through United States law, biology, or western numerical standards. Instead, she turns to Salish material culture, a piece of clothing, and an alternative mathematical understanding as a way to formulate an Indigenous sense of self. As a result she too refigures Alexie's brand of reservation math and U.S. or scientific charts that trace Indian ancestry. Rather, she traces her identity through a dress her mathematician grandmother made for her. Her poem "Grandmother, Salish Mathematician" positions her grandmother working with numbers to effectively replace the "scientists," bureaucrats, and tribes who use western mathematical models to devise blood quantum charts. The dress her grandmother creates helps Iyall-Santos understand who she is through Salish material culture. The math her grandmother traces in the dress's pattern aims for balance and wholeness rather than fractions. She writes,

Grandmother, my Yay-Yay
made this dress with purpose:
for protection, for legacies,
for balance in our worlds. (136)

Her grandmother designed the dress to protect her granddaughter. She also designed it for Iyall-Santos to pass down to her own daughter, not only to protect and balance but to use as a tool for teaching those legacies of balance and protection. Iyall-Santos's dress taught her how to use numbers in a way that maintains balance as opposed to numbers that unbalance mixed-blood identities and create one side of a fraction that always weighs more heavily than the other, thereby disturbing her equilibrium and balance in the world.
        Rather than trace her ancestry through abstract and meaningless numbers on charts, Iyall-Santos garners from the dress several ways to determine identity. One method she uses comes from the geometric patterns laid out in beads her grandmother has stitched on to the dress. Iyall-Santos recognizes numbers' significance but suggests that when used in certain ways, such as measuring blood quantum, they {11} become meaningless. However, the beads on her dress form geometric equations, which she describes as immense:

Measured dimensions hanging abstract,
cut-glass beads strung through thread
creating a matrix of geometry
symmetrical beyond belief,
its value absolute. (136)

She transforms the beaded pattern into a form that expresses a quality separate from the dress. At the same time, the beads appear to represent parts of her heritage held together by a fragile thread, which will shift and move with the dancer's motion, communicating the pattern's meaning. Geometry's calculations metaphorically describe an identity that is symmetrical and balanced. When worn by Iyall-Santos, the dress identifies who she is in her grandmother's mathematical calculations created in beaded patterns formulated through song. The dress's symmetry comes from her grandmother, the dress, beads, songs, and patterns, all of which form what Iyall-Santos refers to as

Equations of perfect balance,
repetitions of patterns complex.
Yay-Yay + Spirit = Balance
balance infinite
in cyclical time. (136)

She has devised an entirely new equation unlike Alexie's equation, which strictly relies on his parents' blood quantum at the expense of tribal culture as a way to establish a connection or relationship to his parents and his community.
        

At the same time, Iyall-Santos's equation is also reminiscent of other equations Alexie formulates elsewhere. In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Old Shirts and New Skins, Alexie links survival and poetry with anger and imagination through the following problems: "Survival = Anger x Imagination" (150) and "Poetry = Anger x Imagination" (15), respectively. While these add up to more life-affirming and healing equations than math that divides an indi-{12}vidual into pieces, anger, like fractions, can still unbalance a person. For that reason, Iyall-Santos excludes annoyance or rage from her mathematical equation. Instead, she finds balance by bringing together her grandmother and the spirit that the dress embodies. The dress, with its beaded patterns that emerge from a creative spirit gifted to her grandmother, which, in turn, extends to her, connects both of them to each other and to the creative force. By creating and sharing an element of Salish material culture, the grandmother offers her granddaughter a particular way of seeing or ordering her world and her identity within that world. When Iyall-Santos dances in the dress, she re-establishes a relationship with her grandmother and with the patterns of their heritage woven on to the dress in beads. The dress as metaphor for Salish cultural and familial relations offers a new way to conceive of identity and relations beyond blood, reminding the wearer of the balance, reciprocity, rhythm, and repetition that result from maintaining proper relations.
        Unlike most of the writers examined so far, Marie Annharte Baker uses humor in her poetry to explore issues of mixed-blood identity. Unlike Allen's and Alexie's narrators, Baker's narrator in the poem "Cheeky Moon" refuses to become complicit in a system that seemingly asks her to acknowledge her mixed-blood status as inferior to full-blood status.⁵ Indeed, the title itself indicates that cheekiness characterizes her insolent, bold, or self-assured attitude. The narrator exhibits no symptoms of internalized self-hatred nor does she engage in self-inflicted violence, cutting herself into pieces. Rather than avert her gaze from accusatory stares or judgmental looks, she stares back at individuals who disapprove of mixed-blood children and the women who bear them:

Those eyes show total disgust
at mothers who got sweet talked.
I am the direct result
-- fruit of the union --
the big cheek breed
who bucks tradition
becomes a typical troublemaker. (38)

{13}
Refusing to apologize for her existence or to remain silent about the histories, social relations, and conditions that created others like her, the narrator, still playing with the word "cheeky," proudly proclaims herself to be a "big cheek breed / who bucks tradition" (38) and upsets the dominant group's battle plans for destroying Indians through statistical extermination.⁶ Ready to engage in battle, this narrator also uses war metaphors, claiming that she is "left to defend / one lonely drop of blood," because, as she explains, "I might terminate / if I get nosebleed" (38). Here, she complicates the traditional meaning of "termination," examining its impact on relations. Since the federal government targeted tribes and not individuals for termination, the narrator expands the meaning attached to "termination" to include individuals.
        Although termination severed relations between tribes and the government, the narrator suggests that the loss of her Indian blood would result in a similar action, severing her relations within her tribal community and her identity as an Indian. The possibility of losing her Indian status provides her with the motivation to defend "one lonely drop of blood" that if lost would, according to her, leave her without an identity she embraces and without a community, because she bases her identity on being an Indian, not an isolated individual or generic Canadian. While her ancestry is not based on one drop, she points to the absurdity of measuring one's identity through blood.
        "Cheeky Moon" ends with the narrator comparing the adherence to blood quantum standards with crabs' perceived instinct for "holding each other back." Baker writes,

I need the law of the land
to respect my blood.
Between you and me
it's the bucket of crabs
pulling us down together. (38)

Her knowledge of crabs' behavior makes this an apt analogy. While it is difficult to contain one crab in a shallow bucket, the addition of a second crab means that they no longer need to be watched. One crab could {14} easily regain its freedom and climb out of its container, but the second crab will pull the first one back before it can escape. At the same time, the crabs do not assist each other in an attempt to escape their impending doom. Clearly, the narrator translates blood quantum as a legal and extra-legal device meant to entrap Indians and pull us down together. It does so by becoming that bucket of crabs that encourages us to prevent each other from finding freedom from what is a restrictive means for defining people. The crab analogy also comments on the relationship that blood quantum creates; it is one that leads to continued devastation. Comparing her position to being alone in a bucket, the narrator does not find herself isolated and alienated. Instead, she exclaims,

I count myself lucky
to salvage my ancestry
in this particular drop
at my time. (38)

In essence, she is just one drop in a bucket among many buckets that contain individuals in similar circumstances. Luckily, she escapes from the mentality that "the bucket of crabs" creates by taking pride in rather than apologizing for the "one lonely drop" of blood that leads others to regard the narrator and her mother with disdain.
        Baker also uses the sub-genre of slam poetry to engage in further political commentary on blood quantum. In "Raced Out to Write This Up," she creates a poem that is meant to be read or performed in front of a live audience, in effect, establishing and affirming new and old relations among friends and strangers. While traditional poetry tends to isolate both poet and reader, spoken word poetry has the opposite tendency. Spoken word poetry brings people together when the poet releases words from a page that, when read alone, silence the poet's voice or deny the poet's active presence. Slam poets work within the oral rather than written tradition and so fuse poetry and performance art. Internationally recognized slam poet Oni the Haitian Sensation (Ingrid Joseph) describes slam poetry as "metaphorically lift[ing] the poem off the page and bring[ing] the words to life."⁷ Slam poetry contains thought-provoking content, and Baker makes {15} her audience aware of her poem's controversial subject matter in the first stanza. She announces,

I often race to write         I write about race         why do I write
about race        I must erase all trace of my race         I am an
eraser abrasive bracing myself embracing.

Baker writes about race yet yearns to eradicate race as a marker of her identity even though the racialized discourse of Indianness and blood quantum have already marked and marginalized her. While Baker identifies as Anishinabe and her physical features mark her as Indian, her blood quantum poems render the "white" part of her identity ambiguous for readers unaware of her Irish background.
        Despite the perceived ambiguity of Baker's identity, she writes about race and mixed-blood status in a way that captures the anger of those whom blood has marginalized. Poetry as performance-driven art contains this kind of personal perspective in order to "encompass the experiences, the struggles and joys of the people in the community; by utilizing poetry as a medium for constructive dialogue, the poet can rhyme about current affairs that are affecting the community" (Joseph 18). Baker becomes the defiant or "cheeky" voice that relates the struggles and joys of a mixed-blood community when she proclaims,

so few of me yet I still write not for the white audience but
the color of their response to my underclassy class         the
flash of their fit to kill me why race away to the finish
when I cross the finish line will it be white          will I be red
from running         hot and cold touch me not less I am to be

divided against my self who is both red and white but not a
shade of pink maybe a beige pink blushed flushed off
white right I color my winning everytime         I am still in the
red not the black         blackened red         reddened black.

Baker admits she is not an academic poet but a poet of another class, a class for whom she writes and a class for whom the dominant group draws a finish line that presumably denotes success if crossed. For Baker, this brand of success means assimilation at the sacrifice of {16} one's own background and worldview. She intimates that denial of self is what the dominant group encourages underclassed and raced bodies to achieve in order to be successful. Baker colors or "races" the finish line white, creating a white barrier she feels she is supposed to cross in order to ensure that her writing "will [. . .] be red" (read). To cross this line puts her in a race against herself, a self that is both red and white, since she equates the kind of winning identified in her poem as white. Refusing to claim whiteness, she avers,"I am still in the / red," which presumably leaves her in a precarious status as a poet whose words do not typically reach large audiences compared to canonized poets or poets who write about less controversial subjects.
        Despite the suggestion that her poetry has not met with the success of more mainstream poets, Baker's "Raced Out to Write This Up" epitomizes the philosophy of slam poetry. Its performative aspect democratizes poetry by granting equal access to those traditionally denied recognition by academic writing programs, publishing houses, and audiences. More significantly, the genre recognizes that an author's social or cultural condition can and should be the subject of poetry. Nuyorican Poets Café co-founder Miguel Algarín suggests that slam poetry's "aim is to dissolve the social, cultural, and political boundaries that generalize human experience and make it meaningless" (9). Baker's poem is comedic, sarcastic, and harshly critical, but her inclusion of race, class, inequality, and whiteness speak to another experience, an experience meaningful in various ways to those whose differences place them at the margins of society. "Otherized" experiences, however, are the subjects that garner attention with slam audiences. So while some might not read her work, deeming her subject matter "unpoetic," slam poetry commands a listening audience, meaning she will be heard and listened to.
        Dominant discourses about Indian pedigree and authenticity clearly have influenced literature; they have also played a role in the production and marketing of "authentic" Indian art under the auspices of the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act (IACA).⁸ Although Congress created this act to protect "government-certified" Indian artisans, it is important to remember that they also wrote it with commerce and {17} consumers in mind. Capitalism also contributes to reservation math and creates signifiers of Indian identity that empower colonial discourse as a form of knowledge and facilitate the dominant culture's ongoing surveillance and control of American Indian populations -- in this case, the control of American Indian artists. Luna and Tsinhnahjinnie use their art to challenge blood quantum and its implications for the IACA. Because performance art and photography are more visual and conceptual than writing, these mediums allow both artists to engage directly in a critical commentary on identity construction.
        In much of James Luna's work, his body becomes a palimpsest on which he inscribes dominant ideologies of race largely based on visual cues that signify Indian identity to others. Like Alexie and Woody, Luna incorporates the language of a fractionated identity into his photographic triptych entitled Half Indian/Half Mexican.⁹ Luna's triptych integrates visual stereotypes that refract back to his audience their own projections, perceptions, and assumptions about Indians and Mexicans, which are largely based on physical appearance. In the left- and right-hand panels Luna presents images of himself in profile, with the left panel containing his Indian half and the right panel his Mexican half. As one might suspect, in the Indian image he has long hair, no beard, and wears an earring; on the Mexican side he has short hair and a moustache. In the center panel, Luna faces the camera. This frame splits or divides the identities on either side. At the same time, the center image unites both identities. In the center panel, the visualized racial cues contained in the two profile shots come together. In this image we see a photograph of a man who is literally and visually half Indian and half Mexican. Presenting notions of blood quantum visually, Luna allows us to see the comic and ironic elements inherent in blood quantum standards and the stereotypes these standards maintain.
        The narrative that accompanies Luna's exhibit also disturbs the dominant culture's objectification and stereotyping of the racialized body through its discussion of blood quantum. A dialogue accompanying the display states,
{18}

I'm half Indian and half Mexican.
I'm half many things.
I'm half compassionate/I'm half unfeeling.
I'm half happy/I'm half angry.¹⁰

By juxtaposing seemingly disparate signifiers, Luna creates a linguistic strategy that reveals and exposes other signifiers that one could attach to identity yet remain outside the language of blood discourse. His identity includes humanizing characteristics such as emotions and feelings. Moreover, Luna claims that he is

A self made up of many things,
I do not have to be anything for anybody but myself.
I have survived long enough to find this out.
I'm forty-one years old and am happy with
my whole -- self
Don't let your children wait as long . . .

Like Woody, Luna claims an identity made up of "many things," including a life experience that creates a complete and contented person, not a divided, alienated, and fractionated self. Often, outsiders expect raced individuals to "perform" race, and for Indians, this usually includes the expectation that one must "look Indian," a prospect that Luna critiques due to its damaging effects on children.
        Since federal blood quantum standards uniformly accept the rule of hyper-descent, the practice of determining a child's lineage through the race of the more socially dominant parent, in effect, they locate "what counts as Indian" in the blood. Additionally, because blood quantum standards rely on hyper-descent, the suggestion is that Indianness is color and that color does matter. When deciding who "counts as Indian," color is privileged, and individuals like joannemariebarker, Louis Owens, and Thomas King feel the repercussions of hyper-descent when they are told that they do not "look Indian." Like Luna, joannemariebarker considers "what counts as Indian" when people respond to and challenge her identity based on her physical features:
{19}

You're really Indian? What's it like to be Indian? How much Indian are you anyway? A half? A quarter? What? You know, you don't look anything like an Indian. What kind of fellowship did you say you were on? I don't mean to be rude, but you really don't look anything like an Indian.

Joannemariebarker's case demonstrates how blood quantum standards are designed to accomplish what simple observation cannot: Indians who do not look "Indian" are excluded, rejected, and looked upon with suspicion. Owens's writing reflects similar feelings of rejection and exclusion. After looking at family photos and admitting that he does not see any visible markers of Indianness among his mixed-blood relatives, he confesses that he must "narratively construct him out of his missing presence" (103). To this Owens adds a reminder to anyone questioning his authenticity that "few looking at [these] photos of mixedbloods would be likely to say, 'But they don't look like Irishmen'" (103). Having been mistaken for Mexican or white while in college, King admits to growing long hair, wearing a fringed leather pouch, and sporting a bone choker around his neck (45-46). Bearing these markers of Indianness, King was accepted as Indian; it is not until he decides to forgo wearing these items that other Indians question his "authenticity," calling him an apple or Uncle Tomahawk (67-68). The experiences of all three prove the government no longer has to police the borders of Indian identity, keeping interlopers and wannabes out; Indians and non-Indians have taken over the responsibility of reducing Indian numbers by challenging those who do not "look Indian." Therefore, what it means to "be Indian" often differs from what "counts as Indian" for the federal government and even for many Indians themselves, and what typically counts is blood and color. Yet, tribal communities offer Indians who do not look the part inclusion and acceptance if they have a tribal enrollment and CDIB (Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood) card. There is not always a correlation between blood quantum and how a person looks, yet many American Indians are quick to challenge others' heritage based on physical appearance.
        By creating and holding federally recognized tribes to blood {20} quantum standards, the federal government has affirmed their right to define who is Indian by eliminating traditionally flexible features that have created and validated Indian identity in the past. Federal acknowledgement based on blood quantum standards also deprives tribes the right of self-identification by giving the government control over meaning. Realizing blood quantum's damaging effects on children, Luna asks parents and adults to affirm children's identity so that they become whole, healthy individuals before it is too late. Luna admits that it took forty-two years for him to fashion a whole and self-determined identity without apology, so he returns to his audience the divided brown bodies in the triptych, images that the dominant culture has appropriated and reinscribed through blood quantum standards. Combining narrative with image, Luna recognizes the potential of performance as a political tool for critiquing dominant paradigms of American Indian identity and articulating an oppositional viewpoint. Therefore, his art functions as a lens through which he brings into focus the struggles and conflicts waged around identity issues.¹¹
        Like Luna, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie also creates photographic images that explore the regulation of Indian identity, but her images allude to potentially more sinister aspects of identity monitoring. Whereas Luna's exhibit visually represents the cultural codes that society has inscribed onto Indian and Mexican bodies, Tsinhnahjinnie's photographic series entitled Creative Native literally superimposes these codes onto an Indian body -- her own -- visibly marking and authenticating her Indianness for those with a vested interest. By visibly marking her identity as Indian, Tsinhnahjinnie imbues with new meaning Beth Brant's words from A Gathering of Spirit: "Who we are is written on our bodies, our hearts, our souls. This is what it means to be Native in the dawn of the twenty-first century" (74). As a Native artist, who Tsinhnahjinnie is in the twenty-first century includes her tribal roll number, which she stamps on her forehead, marking, identifying, and marketing herself to Indian art consumers as a "real," government-approved Indian who can sell her art under the rules of the IACA.
        In addition to her roll number, Tsinhnahjinnie imprints on her {21} face another cultural code that has become so familiar to consumers that it is now barely discernible in the marketplace. She tattoos onto her face Universal Product Codes, better known as bar codes. The superimposed bar codes on her face resemble war paint, possibly leading viewers to ask, "Why bar codes?" Businesses use bar codes to save time and money, and retailers use them along with their accompanying numbers to collect information on customers and their buying habits. The ubiquitous bar code also leads to more efficient production and inventory control by attaching identifying labels to products that allow them be tracked and monitored. Understanding the social and political implications of barcodes -- their use in tracking and monitoring customers buying habits -- problematizes Tsinhnahjinnie's use of them, because they become another tracking device that she makes visible. Her facial bar codes point to the personal data or information about her that they contain. Clearly, she perceives the IACA trademark that the government awards to "real" Indian artists as akin to the bar codes she stamps on her face, which transform her from a human into a product with already collected and verified information from the government about her identity for those who would sell or display her art in their establishments. By imprinting bar codes on her face, she also suggests that the IACA has commodified both Indian art and artists, transforming her into an item sold along with the art she created. Many collectors of Indian art "buy" artists along with their art, collecting whatever their favorite artist creates. Tsinhnahjinnie's critical use of bar codes condemns the IACA's power to collect data that establishes, controls, and markets Indians and their identity for non-Indians interested in purchasing "Indian art" and artists.
        By enforcing blood quantum standards, many American Indians have adopted the government's role of policing Indians through acts that typically take place in public forums intended to identify ethnic frauds to a larger population or to scold others who are "not Indian enough," usually mixed-blood or urban Indians. In an Indian Country Today column, Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee) identifies Ward Churchill as a fraud who is unable to prove any Indian heritage: "While some people in Colorado believe one or an-{22} other of his stories, no Native nation and no Indian community of interest accepts him as one of their own. Native artists never knew nor embraced him, either as an artist or as a Native person." Elizabeth Cook-Lynn critiques several well-known mixed-blood writers who are popular with publishing houses and non-Indian audiences, including Gerald Vizenor, Louis Owens, Wendy Rose, Betty Bell, Thomas King, and Paula Gunn Allen. Her charge against these authors? Due to their mixed-blood status, their writing is not Indian enough, because she considers "mixed-blood literature [as] characterized by excesses of individualism" (69). Cook-Lynn believes American Indian authors have a responsibility to promote nation building and sovereignty, not agonize over identity issues. Harjo and Cook-Lynn caution their readers that ethnic frauds and mixed-blood concerns present the potential to mislead and confuse non-Indians about what is important in our communities. While I am not challenging the well-intentioned motives of Harjo or Cook-Lynn, I am left wondering about the many individuals who were stolen from their parents at birth and adopted out or the individuals who have no say in who their parents will be or where they live. Colonization has changed our lives and challenges us to rethink the way we identify ourselves, and like Garroutte and the authors and artists featured in this article suggest, we need to find another way to talk about Indian identity other than blood quantum, which represents the internalized colonization of Indigenous peoples.
        Theresa Harlan describes Tsinhnahjinnie's Creative Native series as works of art "representing the national debate over institutionalized Native identity by critiquing the reliance of Natives on the federal government for their identity and pointing to the internalized colonization of Native people" (118). In the image Census Makes a Native Artist, Tsinhnahjinnie points to her head, signaling her Indigenous audience to think more deeply about numbers, cards, and documents meant to track and inventory American Indians.¹² Census numbers do not make Tsinhnahjinnie an artist; her sense of proper relations defines her as an Indian artist, with her priorities being the survival and dignified representation of Native peoples. In Census Makes a Native Artist, she points to her head as if asking her-{23}self, "Why should I have to authenticate myself to anyone but my own community?" Tsinhnahjinnie creates a series of self-portraits designed to represent debates about Indian identity, but she also levels her critique at Indigenous peoples' lack of self-criticism regarding the IACA.¹³
        At the same time that many Indigenous artists and writers are engaging in the process of decolonization, there exists the dilemma of the Indian artists whose views on blood quantum become a source of creative inspiration but who at the same time realize that blood quantum remains a means for the government to control their identity under the guise of protecting the production and marketing of Indian art for non-Indian consumers. This article provides no answers but, like Woody, points to the risks we face when we allow western systems of signification to replace our own community frameworks for constructing identity. Instead of turning to more meaningful signifiers such as those listed by Woody or Iyall-Santos, many American Indians have allowed blood quantum to become a totalizing system used to define Indigenous peoples and reassign us to narratives that trap us into assigned roles -- full-blood, mixed-blood, part-Indian, real, authentic, traditional, urban, and so on. Luna masquerades as half Indian and parodies stereotypes attached to race that we accept when we identify ourselves as "half," "mixed,"or "part"anything. What remains significant about Luna's image is that it represents American Indians' adoption of a western-formulated system designed to discipline and hierarchize our own people based on blood, taking over the United States' role in doing this. Luna, Woody, Tsinhnahjinnie, and numerous other American Indian writers and artists create works that remind us to fashion identities that are made up of our values, histories, and experiences, all of which exceed the representational frame of blood quantum standards.

     NOTES

     1. Scholarship examining Indian identity includes Kimberly TallBear, "DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe," Wicazo Sa Review 18.1 (2003): 81- 107; Steve Russell, "Apples Are the Color of Blood," Critical Sociology 28.1-2 (24} (2002): 65-76; Pauline Turner Strong and Barrik Van Winkle, "'Indian Blood': Reflections on the Reckoning and Refiguring of Native North American Identity," Cultural Anthropology 11.4 (1996): 547-76; Hilary N. Weaver, "Indigenous Identity: What Is It, and Who Really Has It?" American Indian Quarterly 25.2 (2001): 240-55; Eva Marie Garroutte, "The Racial Formation of American Indians: Negotiating Legitimate Identities within Tribal and Federal Law," American Indian Quarterly 25.2 (2001): 224-39; Bonita Lawrence, "Real" Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004).
     2. In fractions with common denominators, the two top numbers are added together and the bottom number remains the same. Thus, 8/8 + 5/8 = 13/8 , not13/16. It is unclear if Alexie intended the incorrect sum or not.
     3. According to Guillermo Gómez-Pena, "the work of the artist is to force open the matrix of reality to introduce unsuspected possibilities" (6), and many American Indians artists are doing just this.
     4. Woody's poem, found in Luminaries of the Humble (U of Arizona P, 1994), is also online at Storytellers: Native American Authors Online (http:// www.hanksville.org/storytellers). References to the poem come from the Web site.
     5. For the sake of efficiency, I refer to the narrator as female.
     6. The term "statistical extermination" is taken from Jaimes-Guerrero (423).
     7. Oni is the festival director of the Canadian Spoken Word Olympics.
     8. For more information on the IACA, see the Indian Arts and Crafts Board's Web site (http://www.doi.gov/iacb/act.html). Also see Barker; Sheffield.
     9. For images of James Luna discussed in this section, go to his official Web site (http://www.jamesluna.com/jamesluna1.html) and click on "Images."
     10. Subsequent references to Luna's narrative come from this text.
     11. Similar to Luna and joannemariebarker, Joane Cardinal-Schubert, Ward Churchill, and Jimmie Durham parody the language of blood quantum and consider "how much Indian" constitutes an Indian identity. Cardinal-Schubert critiques the phrase "part Indian," because it fragments. Likewise, Churchill and Durham critique the nonrepresentational reality inherent in the phrase "part Indian." Churchill uses weight to identify that part of his identity that is Indian; he labels 52.5 pounds of his body mass as Indian. Durham turns to his parents. He acknowledges that, although half of his blood comes from his mother and the other half from his father, he iden-{25}tifies as male. Even though time and use have naturalized the language of blood quantum, these examples demonstrate how easily other systems of classification might have become the standard for determining and regulating Indian identity (Strong and Van Winkle 547, 551).
     12. For an image of Tsinhnahjinnie's photo, see the Women Artists of the American West Web site (http://www.cla.purdue.edu/WAAW/Corinne/Tsinhnahjinnie2.html).
     13. For another reading of Tsinhnahjinnie's photographs, see Barker 43-45.
     

     WORKS CITED

Alexie, Sherman. " The Business of Fancydancing. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose P, 1992.

------. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

------. Old Shirts and New Skins. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1993.

Algarín, Miguel. "The Sidewalk of High Art: Introduction." Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café. Eds. Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman. New York: Owl Books/Holt, 1994. 3-28.

Allen, Paula Gunn. "Dear World." Skins and Bones: Poems 1979-1987. Albuquerque: West End P, 1988.

Baker, Marie Annharte. "Cheeky Moon." Gatherings: The En'owkin Journal of First North American Peoples 1 (Fall 1990): 38.

------. "Raced Out to Write This Up." February 11, 2005. http://www.interchange.ubc.ca/quarterm/baker.htm.

Barker, Joanne. "Indian^TM U.S.A." Wicazo Sa Review 18.1 (2003): 25-79.

Brant Beth, ed. A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. "American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story." American Indian Quarterly 20.1 (1996): 69.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994.

Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.

Gómez-Pena, Guillermo. The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems and Loquerías for the End of the Century. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996.

Harjo, Suzan Shown. "Why Native Identity Matters: A Cautionary Tale." Indian Country Today. February 10, 2005. http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410335.

Harlan, Theresa. "As in Her Vision: Native American Women Photographers." Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies. Ed. Diane Neumaier. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995.

Iyall-Santos, Teresa. "Grandmother, Salish Mathematician." Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community. Ed. Heid E. Erdrich and Laura Tohe. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society P, 2002.

Jaimes-Guerrero, M. A. "Savage Hegemony: From 'Endangered Species' to Feminist Indigenism." Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Ed. Ella Shohat. New York: MIT P, 1998.

joannemariebarker and Teresia Teaiwa. "Native Information." Inscriptions 7 (1994). http://humwww.ucsc.edu/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_7/barker.html.

Joseph, Ingrid. "My Perspective." CultureCa. http://www.culture.ca/canada/perspective-pointdevue-e.jsp?data=200501/tcp01100012005e.html.

King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi P, 2003.

Luna, James. "Half Indian/Half Mexican." The Sound of Rattles and Clappers: A Collection of New California Indian Writing. Ed. Greg Sarris. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1994.

Owens, Louis. I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2001.

Sheffield, Gail K. The Arbitrary Indian: The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997.

Strong, Pauline Turner, and Barrik Van Winkle. "'Indian Blood': Reflections on the Reckoning and Refiguring of Native North American Identity." Cultural Anthropology 11.4 (1996): 547-76.

Woody, Elizabeth. "Blood Quantum." Storytellers: Native American Authors Online. January 27, 2005. http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/ewoody/poems/BloodQuantum.html.

------. "Voice of the Land: Giving the Good Word." Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing. Ed. Simon Ortiz. Sun Tracks Series v. 35. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1998. 152-53.

Widening the Circle

Collaborative Reading with Louis Owens's Wolfsong

BLAKE HAUSMAN AND JOHN PURDY         

The scholastic emphasis on cultural pluralism in recent decades has coincided with a technological revolution, and the quincentennial discovery of Columbus by American Indians has coincided with the evolution of the Internet. The Internet has served to close the distance between people, ironically by widening the circle. It is a forum that enables those with Internet access to engage ideas, symbols, and unique voices from around the world. Cyberspace is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, reducing communication barriers created by distances in space. This phenomenon is eminently important to teachers, especially teachers of literature. In an era when scholars are searching for better ways to understand authors from diverse backgrounds, the Internet creates the capacity for people in a classroom to interface, sometimes directly, with the writers they study.
        For writers and readers of American Indian literatures, the digital revolution has often been engaged as a means of storing information. Native language revitalization programs across the continent are using computers in classrooms, and some tribes even provide Internet surfers with the ability to download phrases and fonts from Indigenous languages. Many literary and scholarly journals publish original works on their Web sites, often with links to tribal resources or authors' Web pages. The Internet Public Library offers an excellent catalog of information on hundreds of Indigenous writers. And despite the accurate accusation that the Internet exploits credit consumerism, Sherman Alexie fans who did not get to see The Business of {28} Fancydancing in theaters will surely take solace in the fact that the DVD can be purchased online.
        But what new role can the cyberworld play in the classroom? By using our project as a sort of model, teachers can engage the Internet as a means of reducing the discursive distance between themselves, students, and the writers studied during class. If a classroom has a computer with Internet access as well as an audio/video projector, the entire class can visit authors' Web sites, which often have links to recent interviews. Some interviews in audio format are accessible through IPL, NPR, PBS, the BBC, and other resources, enabling teachers to project an interview with an author during class time.¹ The dynamic of teachers and students both listening while the author discusses his or her work can dramatically reduce the distance between writers and readers through a humanizing process. The authors become speakers in a larger dialogue, dynamic participants in an old conversation who bounce ideas off those they speak to, participants in a live discussion rather than static (or stoic) imaginings bound to exteriorly imposed definitions.
        Our project, based on experiences in a classroom at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, revolves around an email conversation between our students and Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens. The class was a sophomore-level Introduction to American Indian Literatures class. We were team teaching the course. The texts assigned included an anthology, several films, and one novel -- Owens's 1991 Wolfsong.²
        We chose Wolfsong for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the novel is set in the nearby North Cascades, about fifty miles from the Western Washington University campus. We anticipated that its geographical signifificance would attract the students and inspire our initial discussions of the book. Owens graciously agreed to answer questions generated by our students in response to the novel, questions transmitted from Washington to California and back via email. Toward the end of the course, students composed three- to five-page critical essays based on Wolfsong, engaging many issues that the author addressed directly, resulting in a unique crossroads of inquiry.
        -Our project involved many stages. First, both instructors met sev-{29}eral times prior to the beginning of the course.³ We discussed the debates over the need for cultural sensitivity when teaching texts by Native writers (Dorris, Silko, Hobson). We also addressed the issue of "recolonizing" the texts; some critics argue that readers and educators should avoid imposing their own cultural orientation upon the work of Native authors. We agreed that it was necessary to invite students into an engaging, "real-time" discourse, and we saw our dialogue with Owens as a means of achieving this goal by widening the circle of participants beyond the "traditional" classroom and into the lived experience of the author and those about whom she or he writes.
        The following sections reflect the structure of the project:
Reflective Introductions -- initial reflections on the class and goals;
Personal Essays on Wolfsong -- initial personal responses;
Preparations -- ideas from our initial responses to the novel and a list of texts that we assigned prior to the novel;
The Students' Questions, the Author's Answers -- the crux of our project, and a unique email dialogue;
Student Essays -- excerpts from several student papers illustrating how different students responded to their dialogue with the author when composing original essays;
The Teachers' Debriefing -- short essays by each instructor that share our own reactions to the project and the process;
Conclusions -- last thoughts and a list of relevant texts for further inquiry.
These sections progress chronologically, from our initial planning to our concluding reflections, but our readers are encouraged to read the article in whatever manner that they find most suitable.
        Some readers may initially think that this article is somewhat disjointed, lacking a cohesive central narrative. Indeed, it is, but doesn't. It is a gathering of voices from many different places -- geographically, culturally, personally -- that are trying to understand what is happening in the areas around the North Cascades, the space within which we and our students try to coexist. All readers come from different, rather dissimilar, backgrounds, and we bring divergent experiences to the classroom dialogue. Anyone who has tried to teach a complex work of literature can surely empathize with the struggle to {30} construct coherent interpretations of complex texts through class discussion. In this way, our project is an accurate representation of the real-time dynamics of a discourse about American Indian literatures -- different people, distanced from each other, searching for a way to communicate on the same ground.
        Bringing the author's voice directly into the conversation can create common ground. It not only encourages students to invest more personally in the discussion, knowing that their questions serve more than simply to meet requirements and receive a grade. More importantly, this method deflects attention away from the teacher as the source of "definitive" or "authentic" ideas about the text and encourages students to consider issues raised in the reading of course texts as a lived reality, both virtual and vital.

     REFLECTIVE INTRODUCTIONS

Hausman's Introduction

I anticipate this collaborative project with equal amounts of enthusiasm and fear. This is an extraordinary opportunity for me, as a graduate student in English at Western Washington University, both to gain experience teaching Native American literatures and to explore the effect of bringing an author directly into the classroom discussion. John and I will devote our energies to a project that is rather unique. (If I were an undergraduate, my ears would surely perk up if the instructors in a literature class told me that a novelist was going to answer questions of my own design.) However, if the uniqueness of this experiment may encourage others to think that I approach it without feelings of insecurity, I would like to dispel any such ideas right now.
        Yes, I'm afraid. I'm afraid of how the students will react to me as a teacher in this context. I'm afraid of their criticism, though it is probably not as harsh as my own self-criticism. My mother is Cherokee. So am I, though my father is Jewish. I am acutely aware of the long history of part-Cherokee people, or part-Indian people in general, {31} who have abused their status as "Indigenous" as a means of personal gain. The long history of people with Indian ancestry acting as spokespersons for all American Indians, often in universities, and blatantly misrepresenting the people whom they intend to "help," looms ominously. I'm afraid to say anything too decisive about Wolfsong to the students -- afraid I'll say too much, afraid that my words will all be misinterpreted, afraid that I'll be the one blatantly misrepresenting "my people" -- because of fears that I have developed by attempting to make sense of my own place on this continent. Basically, I do not want to "re-colonize" the texts in our classroom, but it seems impossible to avoid.
        Any teacher in the humanities can probably relate to this fear of "re-colonizing." If you are a Euramerican teacher, how do you present Alice Walker to your students? If you are African American, how do you present Amy Tan? If you are non-Indian, how do you present texts by Indigenous poets and storytellers? If you are mixed-blood Indian, how do you know that your perspective, your methods, and your reasons for teaching the work of Indigenous writers are accurate and responsible? For my purposes here, if you are of Cherokee descent, how do you present works by writers who are also of Cherokee descent?
        As we prepare to team teach this Introduction to Native American Literatures course, I have high hopes for our Wolfsong project. Ideally, the dynamics of actually bringing Louis Owens's ideas into the classroom, having the author himself respond to students' questions, will redirect many of the factors that create my fears and help transform them into something useful and relevant for the students. Hopefully, this project will cause the students to perceive Louis as a real person, as a flesh and blood storyteller who actually does exist. Perhaps this project will enable John and me to act less as administrators of the novel and more as facilitators, attempting to thwart misrepresentation by keeping the meaning open and the writer alive, and by having varying -- perhaps even conflicting -- readings of the novel.
        This project may enable me to discuss Wolfsong as someone trying to read it critically and make some sense of it (as our students will be {32} attempting to do with their essays) rather than as someone who closes the novel's meaning by speaking too authoritatively about it as a "displaced Cherokee" novel. In class, I want to focus on what's happening in the novel itself, to read the characters as unique people in their own right, rather than try to fix the text's meaning through my own perspective of southeastern Indian removals and how the novel seems to echo those removals. More on this later, because I think it will inevitably come out during class discussion.

Purdy's Introduction

My consideration of our students echoes Blake's, with a slight variation. Our engagement with Owens's novel brings home, once again, the problematical qualities of introductory courses such as this. First, they are usually "general education" courses that factor as requirements in various ways at institutions of higher education. In other words, students take them for very different, sometimes conflicting reasons: some because they are Native, some because they have to, some out of curiosity, and others out of an empathy -- however they may define or experience it -- for Native Americans. Each motive carries its own set of attitudes and problems that require attention. Nonetheless, this is where "diversity issues" (a phrase often employed by administrators to group together, simplify, and thus contain sometimes disparate and always complex realities) are made central to the curriculum, and thus the tension, controversy, and contention generated around who should teach them and how -- around pedagogy.
        Second, introductory courses have an inherent tendency, given the class makeup and location of the classes in curricula, to reduce texts to political statements or a list of overarching cross-cultural issues, as presentations of the historical "plight" of oppressed peoples. In part, this is reinforced by the fact that these required courses are termed "ethnic" or "minority" and so on and thus are perceived to be created for political expediency, so students expect them to be driven by a sentimental survey of events locked in an inviolable past. While I would argue that these courses are absolutely necessary, I would {33} also argue that their curricular positioning can set up students to respond to our course texts in prescribed ways, as political tracts only and not as dynamic works of art first and foremost.
        Obviously, the socioeconomic, cultural, and historical issues many texts in an introductory Indian literatures course raise are crucial for students to engage and understand. However, ironically, the centrality of issues carries with it a concomitant danger of dismissal through overgeneralization; the logic is easy and comfortable and all too common: "Ethnic literatures are protest driven, so reading one text is like reading them all."All students need do in response, then, is simply parrot concern about marginalized and exploited peoples and the "good" grade and credit are forthcoming.
        This tendency must be resisted at all turns. It can be accomplished at one level by information: the historical and social contexts out of which the issues derive. These facts can bring home the reality of oppression and survivance (as Gerald Vizenor terms the survival of Indigenous peoples despite horrific events) in compelling ways, although this alone is not enough. Vizenor's work -- particularly his trickster discourse, such as the wonderful movie Harold of Orange -- and the work of authors like him can also assist us in this educational process. When students laugh, they approach the issues with barriers and boundaries diffused, if not deconstructed.
        A related, and I believe crucial, approach is to call attention, continually and with close readings, to the diversity of artistic visions and lived experience the texts tell. This underscores the wonderful complexity of the literary production of Indian writers. As with any canon, the personal and myriad ways of telling a story contribute to the evolution of literature in general but also to society and its concepts of aesthetics. This moves texts from margin to center in subtle yet important ways.
        Also, but not finally, another option derives from this experiment: to involve the students personally, and this may be accomplished by a careful selection of one or more texts with which they may identify either through the characters or through the setting, as with our selection of Wolfsong. There are myriad possibilities here, as well. Bildungsromans abound, as do stories of young people in love, and for {34} those students whose concepts of vampires need fine tuning, there is Aaron Carr's Eye Killers. The possibilities are numerous, various, inviting. To reinforce and extend this, the technological possibilities are also growing at an unprecedented rate; today, unlike the not-so-distant past, one may consider engaging the author in direct discourse. This personalizes the texts in some compelling ways, as anyone who has taken students to readings may attest, and with so many authors pushing the conventions of the past, there is a heightened need and convenient means (the Internet) for them to share their evolving sense of the canon and its future.

PERSONAL ESSAYS ON WOLFSONG

Hausman's Essay

Wolfsong's construct develops from tricky tribal dynamics and contradictions. Louis Owens identifies himself as a Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish person. His tribal genes traveled westward by force and choice until he was born in Lompoc, California. Wolfsong is set in Washington's North Cascades, a place where Cherokees and Choctaws are not indigenous any more than Norwegians, and a place where Owens's own work experience informs his literary descriptions of the physical environment. These details in and of themselves are not contradictions -- Owens, like many mixed-blood Indigenous Americans, has tribal roots in the East and personal experience living and working in the West. However, a plethora of contradictions comes with the consciousness that Owens employs to tell Tom Joseph's story in Wolfsong.
        Owens characterizes Tom Joseph as a full-blood Stehemish Indian, a member of a tribe whose numbers are small and appear to be shrinking. Thus, Owens takes a risk that opens several avenues for critique. First, why must the tribe be shrinking? Secondly, why does a mixed-blood Choctaw-Cherokee guy need to employ the consciousness of a full-blood Indigenous northwestern protagonist to tell this story? These questions become even trickier with the fact that there is no Stehemish tribe. The word "Stehemish" is a composite of Indig-{35}enous northwest names like Stehekin, Snohomish, and Swinomish. The traditional Stehemish cosmology is likewise a composite of traditional and modern lives of Indigenous northwesterners. By constructing a fictional tribe, Owens avoids criticism that would surely follow if he created Tom's character as a full-blood person living on one of the state's many reservations, and he avoids placing himself in a position to misrepresent a real tribe that is not his own.
        Mixed-blood Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan does something similar in her 1998 novel Power -- she tells the story of a full-blood narrator (Omishto) from a fictional tribe in southern Florida ("Taiga," likely a composite of Seminole, Chickasaw, and Taino). Power's drama parallels the sickness and shrinking population of the Florida panther, and destruction of Indigenous culture is consciously fused with destruction of the "natural" environment and panther habitat. The environmentalist dilemma is personified in the choices faced by the young protagonist of the fictional tribe.
        Like Owens's, Colorado-born Hogan's Indigenous ancestors were subject to the brutal Indian removals from the East in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Owens, Hogan sets her book in the Southeast. I believe that Hogan projects her own tribal consciousness of the southeastern Indian removals onto a young full-blood person whose fictional ancestors stayed and managed to survive the genocide, a young person whose knowledge of the past informs her choices at a present coming-of-age crossroads. I believe that Wolfsong is performing a similar projection of tribal and personal consciousness, but the direction is inverted -- Owens takes his own consciousness of the simultaneous genocide, removal, and industrial development (such as mining) that occurred in the Southeast and projects it onto the consciousness of Tom Joseph and the personal crossroads he faces in the present-day Pacific Northwest.
        I relate to Tom Joseph in that I reside in the Northwest. My own Indigenous ancestors were from the Southeast, however, and I do not pretend that my own "mixed" identity grants me an intuitive understanding of an Indigenous northwestern consciousness. But then again, Tom Joseph's consciousness is consciously fictional, so I sup-{36}pose that Owens invites me into Tom's composite fictional mind because of this contradiction.
        Like Tom, I have an uncle who has worked hard to resist the construction of mining operations on lands where treaties still maintain tribal rights to water and hunting. My uncle is a lawyer on the Colville Reservation, and he has struggled against several resource-extraction corporations such as the Houston-based Battle Mountain Gold Company, who have spent considerable effort to construct an open-pit leech mine in north-central Washington. The issues are real, and they are heated, and there are no monolithic positions held by all members of any particular group involved.
        The road between my home in Bellingham and my uncle's home in Okanogan County is State Route 20, the North Cascades Highway, one of the most beautiful roads in North America. Of course, the road wasn't initially built to make car travelers ogle at the area's majestic beauty -- it was built to facilitate mining through the region during the twentieth century. Today, there is no Indian country in these mountains. The Upper Skagit Reservation sits in the western foothills near Baker Lake, and the larger Colville Reservation is across the pass on the eastern side, but the industry in what is now the North Cascades National Park paralleled the eradication of an visible Indigenous presence in that region of the state.
        This parallel of colonization, resource extraction, and Indian removal exists in both the North Cascades and the deep Southeast, a parallel which Owens synthesizes into the consciousness of his protagonist. Just as the 1828 "discovery" of gold in northern Georgia predicated the Indian Removal Act, and just as the white settlers who rushed to the Old Cherokee Nation dug for gold that would keep their "ownership" economy going, the looming construction of Wolfsong's fictive Honeycutt Copper mine seems poised to involve the elimination of an Indigenous cultural presence in the area around the town of Forks (which is actually Darrington) and the mountain Dakobed (Glacier Peak) in order to boost the depressed local economy.⁴ Tom Joseph's story begins with the death of his uncle, who had stayed to try and stop the mine. Now, Tom must choose between two paths that seem mutually exclusive -- complet-{37}ing a college degree with the promise of future leverage or continuing his uncle's resistance to this particular mine. Staying at college means removing himself from the land, thereby causing Tom's fate to be similar to generations of Indians before him. Thus, Tom Joseph's personal crossroads is inseparable from choices about environmental politics and his own sense of self, purpose, and place. His crossroads is both very real and entirely fictional.
        "The crossroads" itself is, of course, an archetype in American folk consciousness. Everyone is at least somewhat familiar with the story of Robert Johnson's "deal with the devil" and the lyrics of Johnson's tune "Crossroads," which describe the speaker's attempt to "catch a ride." Our first glimpse of Tom Joseph as he rides a Greyhound up the West Coast with his clothes in Bob McBride's guitar case reverberates through the entire novel. Tom is clearly searching for something, and the novel constantly plays on how far Tom is willing to go to fulfil this search. The importance of "song" and "singers" in this story should not be overlooked -- perhaps Wolfsong's environmental dilemma can be just as easily explained by analyzing the Robert Johnson story as by reflecting on the author's own identity and consciousness. Of course, stories say that Johnson's fabled deal with the devil occurred in Mississippi, the traditional tromping grounds of Owens's Choctaw ancestors, before he "caught his ride" out.
        The Robert Johnson story contains three main characters -- Johnson, the devil, and the guitar.⁵ Wolfsong's cast is much larger, and it includes several non-human elements as well. As a result, everything moves in interesting ways. In order to activate all of the elements that converge at Tom Joseph's crossroads, Owens animates the physical environment. For example, active verbs portray inanimate objects as the origin point of movements. Consider these phrases from the first paragraph of chapter 2:

the tires threw rain off the asphalt
tall black firs stabbed a layer of cloud
the rain slanted in the wind
wind cut the tops off waves and wove whitecaps around the broken stone (13)

{38}
Owens animates the physical environment to the point that it becomes an active element, a character in the story. Tension between the "mechanical" and the "natural" components of the environment engulfing Forks serves as a central locus for both Owens's sleek style and the issues that complicate Tom's choices. Tom's vision of suffocating emptiness, though we don't read about it until a little farther into the novel, precipitates his return to Forks. The land is singing, but it has been changed by machinery.
        Owens builds tension by not only amplifying the fear and violence bred by deeply entrenched racism but more importantly by weaving these tensions directly into a fabric where politics and economics are intimately linked to identities and environments. Wolfsong presents a chaotic collision of worlds, each with an active synthetic consciousness, and the lines that distinguish people amplify rather than clarify the chaos. This grinding tension emanates throughout the novel, eating at the people closest to Tom Joseph.
        The novel opens with an ending, as Tom's Uncle Jim dies in the first chapter. Before his death, readers witness his attempts to sabotage the construction of the road to the future Honeycutt Copper mine with guerrilla rifle attacks on construction machinery. Jim does not open fire on the workers, just the machinery. Consider these passages from the book's opening chapter:

"What the hell you doing?" a high squeaky voice shrilled from behind the other tractor. A black baseball cap rose over the cat's track and the voice squeaked, " 'A 'ere Krag put a hole in you big enough to drive this fuckin cat through."
     The big man sighed and squinted at the trees above him. "Hell, Jim Joseph ain't going to shoot nobody -- he wanted to shoot somebody you and me'd been shit out of luck a long time ago." (3)

Dinker looked at the timbered slope. "Maybe he's jest waiting to blast us new assholes," he said.
     "Naw. He never takes more'n a couple shots." Leroy rubbed the reddish gray stubble on his chin with the back of his hand and let out a long breath."Serves us right for working our asses {39} off out here while everybody else is in town. Fuck the overtime."
     "You're crazy trying to talk to that old man." Dinker squinted through the rain from under the brim of his cap. "Maybe he's still setting up there. Nobody knows what crazy people do, specially crazy injuns." (7)

The workers' dialogue conveys the depth of Jim's detachment from the mainstream Forks community, a sentiment furthered by many dialogues throughout the novel. Jim dies in isolation, and this isolation serves as the beginning to Tom Joseph's story.
        Tom's dislocation is furthered by his studies at UC-Santa Barbara. It will be interesting to see how our students, who may sign up for the course because they want to "learn more" about Indians, respond to Tom's memories of Santa Barbara. Something I find intriguing is that Tom only perceives the university through memory -- as far as the act of narration or reading is concerned, the university is always in the past, and it sifts further and further away from Tom's immediate experience as the novel progresses. In a way, Tom invents the university as much as it invents him.
        The town of Forks has a strange connection to the California university, and its inhabitants are dubious of things Californian. Many townspeople resent Tom for his studies, such as local lumber patriarch J. D. Hill's son, Buddy, who taunts Tom for going "all the way to Califuckinfornia to learn to be an Indian" (130). The town's collective xenophobia is projected on Tom for studying in California, furthering the ironic notion that Tom does not belong in his hometown, that he is even more of a "foreigner" now than before.
        However, many people in Tom's hometown encourage him to leave town. The pro-industry Forks residents, which include nearly everyone in town, fear that Tom will assume his uncle's role as the man who resists the mine's construction. As such, they want him out. They want him to return to California. Some mine-motivated locals even seem concerned with the "plight" of Tom's tribe, encouraging him to return to college because doing so could result in more power and leverage in the future, a sentiment exemplified by these lines {40} from J. D. Hill: "You're not only the first boy from Forks to get a scholarship to a university, you're an Indian. . . . You can go back to school, and you can do a lot more to help your people than you can without an education" (66). While Tom could perhaps "do a lot more" in the future, the fact remains if he leaves town to return to Santa Barbara, he will be "removing" himself from the ancestral lands. In this case, academia is removal. The historical fact is, of course, that "American education" has long been a means of removing young Indian people from their families and ancestral lands, a fact echoed by Tom's dream of severed tongues. The American educational system has historically removed Indian students in order to include them into a "new" collective. The school is a place for "reconstruction," for creating pan-tribal alliances and identities as a result of dislocation from the "original" lands. The American school is contradictory nexus for Native diaspora, and Wolfsong plays with this contradictory role that universities are now playing in the "revitalization" of Indigenous cultures. The university is simultaneously a traditional colonial apparatus and a contemporary source of political power to resist colonialism. To further the contradiction, Owens himself is a professor, a job that would seem to repulse his protagonist.
        Tom's predicament has his family worried, but they are realists. His mother and brother tell him to leave, to finish school, to avoid becoming like his uncle. Everyone who seems to like Tom wants him to leave, trying to convince him to go back to school, to become an Indian lawyer, someone with a commanding degree. Tom's old girlfriend, Karen, a green-eyed Cherokee with Bear visions, is engaged to Buddy Hill (the patriarch's son) and pregnant with Buddy's child. Karen repeatedly tells Tom that he should not have come back, that he could not expect things to stay the same, that he should leave soon before it gets worse. But despite all these urgent warnings to leave Forks and return to UCSB, Tom does not leave. He chooses to stay at home after his uncle's funeral.
        Tom does not want to return to the university, to Southern California, to mixed-bloods from the Native American Students Association telling him how to be Indian. Bob McBride, Tom's roommate and friend at college, provides Owens with ample space to probe the {41} construction of Native American identity. McBride, Tom tells us early on, joins everything. President of the Native American Student Association and enrollee of the Confederate Salish-Kutenai tribe, McBride's character manifests an Indian identity through connections to and affiliations with organizations or ceremonies recognized by the dominant culture as "Native American," regardless of how homogenizing these things may be. I find it interesting that, like UCSB itself, our only images of McBride in the first half of the novel come through Tom's memories. Not surprisingly, Tom remembers McBride's most ironic quotes, such as references to universities as the "Native-American-economic-opportunity-big-time"(27). McBride's physical absence allows Owens to play with Tom's perception of these seemingly overeager affiliations. Once readers finally do meet McBride, contradictions of tribal identity abound. Consider the ironies at play in chapter 22, when McBride rolls into town and invites Tom to "pierce and protest":

[Tom] thought about the fact that McBride had been through a lot of ceremonies that he knew nothing about and how funny that was. He was the fullblood, but McBride, who's grown up on the old Flathead reservation, seemed more Indian in some ways with his seven-eighths white ancestry. (183)

Tom isn't drawn to join organizations that confirm his "Indianness." The affirmation of his Indigenous identity, to paraphrase a recurrent theme from Owens's Other Destinies, develops out of a connection to the land itself.
        So Tom stays at "home," thus finding himself in a predicament also noted in Other Destinies -- he is forced to choose between the white path and the Indian path. In some ways, this causes Wolfsong to fall clearly in line with many of the Native novels written after D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded, revisiting the McNickle binary.⁶ Indeed, the symbolic "white road" is manifest in the literal road under construction, which will eventually lead to the site of the copper mine. And for Tom, there seems to be no "Indian road" available, short of assuming the role of armed guerrilla left vacant after his uncle's death.
{42} 
       By the novel's end, Tom fully assumes his uncle's persona, but he is chased out of town as he does so. Unlike his uncle, Tom does kill a person in his actions to protect the environment, again problematizing Tom's identity in relation to his actions.⁷ The story concludes as Tom blows up a water tower built by the mining company. As such, he's the hero: His Indian identity is affirmed; he sends a powerful blow to the mining company; and his uncle's spirit seems to have settled in him as he climbs north to hide from pursuers. He liberates the water, the source of life, from its imperial metal containers. However, I'm not entirely sure if Tom has (in the eyes of "the machine," anyway) done much other than simply delay the process. Thus, though Wolfsong ends on a note that seems revolutionary, it invites both hope and skepticism through the contradictions and ambiguity of its final images.
        Tom is not a typical "hero" in the romantic western movie sense: He does not "get the girl" because he cannot be with his old girlfriend, Karen, as her dysfunctional relationship with Tom's nemesis, Buddy Hill, continues at the novel's conclusion. Karen's character is compelling and complex. I think Karen's relationships with Tom and Buddy will be easily accessible elements of the story that will quickly engage our students' attention and empathy. We should consider how the readings we assign prior to Wolfsong may prepare students to critique these dysfunctional dynamics.
        It is hard to avoid imagining the events that occur after the novel ends. I'm prone to think that Tom is heading up to British Columbia, to Aaron Medicine's place. Tom's first experience in British Columbia seems to have opened his eyes to a "Pan-Indian" or "Native American" experience that is more tangible and meaningful than his memories of UC-Santa Barbara. Indeed, Aaron Medicine's character is archetypal -- a Lakota Sun Dancer with a sweatlodge in his backyard, where all sorts of people, Indian and non-Indian, come to pray and cleanse themselves. Wolfsong invites me to remember that despite the merchandising and advertised accessibility of a Plains-ish spirituality, something very real and very sacred does connect all people. Does it come from the land? Or rather, how does it come from {43} the land in Wolfsong? Regardless of how and where it comes from, the big question for our purposes here as instructors is how our students will respond. Consider potential student reactions to this line, which Aaron Medicine speaks to Tom: "We don't mean that an Indian can't watch the Super Bowl or use a microwave oven if he feels like it, we just want people to find out who they are" (193). While this line masquerades as a clear statement, it is filled with several layers of contradictions, and the texts we assign prior to Wolfsong need to expose some complexities and contradictions of human and tribal identity in order to prepare students for this novel.
        Purists would likely have a tough time with Wolfsong. The book is not "traditional" in a reclusive or commodified sense because the story's "origins" are vague. Where does the story itself really come from? Is it a Salish story? A Choctaw-Cherokee story? A "Native American" story? Simply a good story? While Wolfsong may indeed be all of these things, our students will bring their own assumptions about economics, identity, and tradition to the mix, and the outcomes of this experiment will no doubt speak to the diversity of our students' perspectives.
        I must confess, however, that I am concerned about being too directive with my reading of the novel. I don't really want to bombard my students with my own interpretation of how Owens's personal and tribal histories converge within the protagonist's fictional composite consciousness. Doing so would make me feel like too much of an anthropologist, employing what may seem like static, museumesque terminology to explicate the story. Moreover, I would probably resent such apparent reduction if a critic wrote something similar about my own fiction, suggesting that understanding my metaphors involved little more than applying my own Jewish-Cherokee tribal consciousnesses to explicate fictional symbols. I am too self-critical to speak authoritatively about my initial analysis of Wolfsong. However, I am hopeful that we can encourage our students to generate questions for Louis Owens that speak to such issues.
        Having said all of this, I must now confront my own hypocrisy. Here I am writing about how land ethics and industrial economics {44} relate to identity and place, yet I have only lived in Washington State for a few years. My cultural orientation to the novel is much different than it is for John Purdy, who was born and raised in the foothills of the Oregon Cascades. Perhaps I want to perceive the North Cascades, in real life and in Owens's novel, as a projection of the southern Appalachians. Perhaps I want to see a southeast Indian story transplanted onto the Northwest landscape, because that's how I perceive my own identity in relation to this "American" place, because doing so enables me to make more sense of my identity in this northwestern place in particular. I probably need to deconstruct my own cultural orientation, despite my assumptions that Owens is playing with something similar.

Purdy's Essay

Since the subjectivity of the reading and interpretive process has been the focus of so much debate in literary studies in contemporary times, it seems wholly appropriate to initiate a discussion of Owens's novel by sharing our personal reactions to it. By doing so, I hope to provide some points of entry into its concerns and to explore some of the ways Owens's vision intersects those of other contemporary American writers. To facilitate this initial phase of what promises to evolve into an extensive discourse, I would like to focus on two obvious fundamentals of the novel -- place and people -- for the novel adequately demonstrates Owens's talent for capturing the essence of both through finely tuned descriptive details, details that carry with them profound implications, at least for this reader.
        I will out myself; I am a fourth-generation northwesterner, and Owens's details of place speak intimately to me. I too have hiked, fished, and hunted these mountains. However, Owens's tale also foregrounds the migratory patterns that speak to colonialism here and its various manifestations. At its heart, there is the colonial bottom line: extractive benefits for the colonizer. The colonial urge to occupy and possess exists today as well, and it has been subsumed into contemporary life in ways that students without the discursive prompting of Owens and other writers may never recognize.
{45}
        Owens spent several years in close interaction with the place and the people he characterizes in his novel. Working for the National Forest Service out of its regional office in Darrington, Washington, he built and maintained trails through the Mt. Baker/Snoqualmie National Forest and Glacier Peak Wilderness, fought forest fires, and even served as an enforcement officer at one point. Despite the shifting of the fictive locale to the town of Forks (also in Washington and very much like the town of Darrington), the setting mapped out in the novel is in the upper basins of the Skagit and Sauk rivers, and it is one with which he became very intimate. As Owens notes, this is also where (and when) he began writing the novel.⁸
        To say that Owens conveys a realistic sense of the Sauk and Skagit river valleys is too obvious. Their steep terrain, glacier-covered peaks, expansive rain forests, and indigenous fauna are all convincingly and beautifully portrayed. The significance of this observation for literary studies, at least for this reader, though, lies in the way that this realistic depiction evolves, merging with political, economic, and psychological implications far beyond this one geo-specific locale. In other words, in his exploration of the ways that people have interacted with this place over a long period of time, Owens evokes some intriguing historical facts that account for current issues: the degradation of the environment, the threat of loss for Indigenous cultures, the future of a country comprising diverse cultures.
        This novel speaks very personally to me. I grew up in a small town very similar to the Forks of the novel. This fact shapes my reading of it; I know these people and, like Tom Joseph, went to school with the descendants of "settlers." I know the "lingo," the lexicon Owens deploys to give the material life of loggers: crummy, caulked boots, choker setter, widow makers. Like Forks, my hometown is situated in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, and it shares a similar character because of its history. Primarily a farming and logging community, it was founded earlier than Forks/Darrington, since it was a terminus of the Oregon Trail and thus became a point of debarkation for those who moved northward to the land of the novel. In other words, Owens's story operates in a recent colonial dynamic: the lived reality for numerous western, culturally and ethnically charged com-{46}munities that emerged from the urge of Manifest Destiny and now must live with the effects of that history.
        Furthermore, in Owens's peopling of the valley, he teases us with the suggestive nature of these mixed migration patterns that came to shape the character of this place and the contemporary reality of the people in it who descend from its original inhabitants. The most recent immigrants to the forestlands come from urban areas in search of a "wilderness" experience (and perhaps suggest the stories of Jack Kerouac's and Gary Snyder's trips to this same area of the state to serve in a remote lookout to commune with nature). Before this recent migration, however, an earlier generation came from northern Europe -- from Sweden, Norway, and Finland -- and found work in the logging camps of the Northwest, founded by the "Americans" who preceded them. These initial immigrants from other pioneer locations in the West, but also from the East, had a very different history from those who came later, as reflected in the dialect they speak in the novel. These townsfolk came from the South, through the Midwest (where quite often families lived for a time before moving to the far West), and then often over the Oregon Trail or, later, on the "immigrant trains" that provided a quicker and simpler mode of transportation into the promised land. These early American "settlers" comprised a significant portion of the expanding population, and with them came the socio-political and economic orientation of their ancestors. These are the attitudes and motivations Owens unpacks in the novel.
        In fact, the institution of slavery, as it evolved in the South, can be found in the novel's interrogation of racism based upon a utilitarian urge; just as plantation owners exploited their environment and fellow humans for profit and power, the founders of Forks carved out their own empire by erasing Native peoples and subjugating Indigenous lands, and their ideological descendants face the repercussions. These are what William Stafford -- once Oregon's poet laureate -- termed "the flute end of consequences."
        The novel reflects the colonial history of these immigrants' interactions with the Stehemish, whose long tenure in this valley evolved a {47} culture and land-use philosophy strikingly different from the one imported with the new arrivals. Unlike other locations where reservations were formed, the Upper Skagit area is dotted with "trust lands," small plots of forestlands or homes held in trust by the federal government for Native Americans. Often, these plots are not contiguous with the reservation and thus where housing and such are located, and sometimes they are separated by miles. This patchwork landscape is the home of the Josephs and the old burial plot of their kin.
        Owens portrays the results of a philosophy of extractive exploitation and the linked policy of appropriating lands through "private ownership," which precipitates the fragmentation of place through the imposition of arbitrary (and unnatural) boundaries such as the acre, the deed, the property line, the reservation boundary, and the forest "unit" or "sale." He chronicles the results in Wolfsong, from the loss of ancient forests and viable ecosystem to equally fragmented communities -- old and new -- that depended upon them.
        This is the social milieu of "Forks." The word itself is simple, in stream terminology: two ways diverging, or converging, depending upon the direction you are traveling. Owens's complicating of the word, however, is one intriguing aspect of the novel. While some writers may dwell upon easy social binaries, the game of "cowboys and Indians" Owens evokes at times in the novel, he chooses to blur the lines with characters who more accurately depict the multiple directions of the acculturation and cultural exchange that have taken place since first contact. Significantly, these characters, and the choices they make, also carry a subtext about the long-term effects of place upon people. Later, in this process of discovery with our students, I would hope we discuss Vern Reese, Sam Garvey, Ab Masingale, and Ranger Grider in some detail. For the moment, though, I'd first like to consider the most eccentric character in the book and use that discussion to provide some groundwork for the others.
        Consider John Hanson, "Crazy John," a character personally attractive to me for several reasons besides the obvious: his name. Small towns are notorious for such characters, those on the edge of the social order although never completely excluded from the civic {48} body. (In my hometown, there were two, and Owens told me that the character was based on a person in the Darrington area.) We meet him first as Tom Joseph rides the last few miles home in a logging truck driven by a fellow townsman, Amel. This is a scene familiar to those who have read several contemporary Native novels, for it reflects what Bill Bevis once termed "homing-in."⁹ Like Archilde, the protagonist of D'Arcy McNickle's 1936 novel The Surrounded, and his literary descendents such as Abel in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, Tom Joseph is coming home from a life in the world far beyond this one small community. On the way, he and Amel see Crazy John, as always in his front yard carrying out a relentless war against the encroachment of the blackberry vines. I believe Owens is working on several levels with this scene, and I would like to unwrap a few.
        First, there is the allusion, the resonance mentioned above; Owens is a literary critic and teacher of Native fiction as well as a novelist.¹⁰ However, in Crazy John's war against "the wilderness" as it tries to reestablish its natural order upon the industrialized worldscape brought with the European immigrants, we also find the often promoted idea of society's fear of the "wilds." This has often been a subject of discussion, one piece of the critical discourse, that surrounded the early attempts to differentiate between Indigenous and immigrant cosmologies. As the idea went, the Puritans feared the apparent disorder, the lack of God's order, in the "wilderness" of this continent and therefore considered the lands beyond human "settlement" (a term suggestive in and of itself) the domain of the devil and thus due for God's colonial influence. To what degree this is an accurate simplification of that social orientation is still the subject of debate; nonetheless, the idea has certainly worked its way into the literature of this continent, from Henry David Thoreau and, more specifically for many of the characterizations in the novel, James Fennimore Cooper to Gary Snyder and, more importantly for Owens, John Steinbeck, the idea of humankind at war with the wilderness, the natural world, is pervasive. Owens's deployment of this concept, though, melds the literary tradition beautifully with the social. The ecological message touches all of us through the pragmatic, utilitarian need to use the (49} "resources" one finds for one's own gain. That is the story of the West.
        But to this story Owens adds two related, interesting qualities by re-envisioning the somewhat stock character of Crazy John, the war veteran turned gospel preacher.¹¹ The first quality rests in Crazy John's ability to "see" the spirits of the place, whom townsfolk seem to think he equates with demons (and which he seems to confuse with Indians at times), and the other is his apparent ability to prophesy. The former is presented in our first encounter with him, only a few pages after we are introduced to the spirits of the land that dance as Tom's uncle, Jim Joseph, dies. The latter capability comes late in the novel, when John coveys the foreshadowing of the novel's conclusion, telling Tom that the "demons" are calling for him, just as they had for his uncle. The ironic reversal, though, hinges upon the orientation of the reader, which must acknowledge the convention of demonizing the "wilderness" and shift to valorizing it: One must grant the place its own and the possibility that it exists not as a commodity for use but with a presence that it would be best not to ignore. Crazy John exemplifies the ways that one's own character may evolve dramatically -- for good or ill -- through a close association with place, in this case a place with a long-standing relationship with Tom's people.
        The story speaks to me in this way. It is not the only thing it says, nor does its voice speak in a monotone. My hearing rises and falls, hesitates and moves on, rethinking what Owens has said. Our students will speak it their way, and there's the hub.

        REPARATIONS

As we conceptualized how to schedule the readings and assignments in this particular English 235 course (Introduction to Native American Literatures), we knew that our email dialogue with Louis Owens would be the centerpiece of the course. The trick was how to prepare the students to ask Owens some good questions.
        There were seats for seventy-five students in the class, and we required the students to purchase two books for the course -- an anthology of texts by and about Native writers and Owens's novel Wolf-{50}song. We expected mostly white students, given the demographic realities of our Northwest campus, and indeed that's what we got. A minority of the students consisted of Asian American, African American, and Native American people. A few of the students were mixed-blood people with Native ancestry whose tribal roots became evident as they chose to share their family stories. While we don't believe that these facts should directly affect the process of choosing which texts to assign in such courses, we were aware all along that the majority of our students, like the fictional students that Owens characterizes through Tom Joseph's memories of UCSB, would be white people in search of more knowledge about Indians.
        Western Washington University, like all the public colleges in our state, runs on the ten-week quarter system. The survey nature of the course mandates a midterm and final exam. Students also composed multiple essays for the class -- four one-page essays in response to films that students viewed outside of class and one three- to five-page essay in response to Wolfsong.

We decided early on to provide a vague essay prompt for the Wolf-song assignment. The essay assignment, which the students were informed of in the syllabus, was this: "a three- to five-page critical analysis of a significant element of Wolfsong." The most concrete part of the Wolfsong assignment was the collaborative process itself. From the beginning of the class, students knew the author was going to participate. We hoped that students would use this opportunity to generate their own essay ideas through the process of asking the author some more particular questions regarding issues of their own immediate interests, but we also knew that our schedule of readings prior to Wolfsong would shape the students' questions by giving them a context to ground their inquiries. We assigned Wolfsong after the midterm but before the final. The email exchange with Owens took place around week seven, and the students' papers were due at the end of week nine.
        The texts we choose from the anthology were texts that both addressed issues raised in our own initial responses to the novel (part 2 of this project) and exposed several often contradictory angles on these issues. Our initial reactions to Wolfsong both discussed place, and this is often an initial point of entry for students as they read Native novels. In this instance, Owens calls attention to the land and the impending ecological threat, so we paired the novel with the movie Clear Cut. Although set in Canada (fortuitously the place to which Wolfsong's protagonist escapes), it raises similar issues of ecological and cultural loss tied directly to the history of colonialism. Second, questions of identity are highlighted throughout the novel, as they are in poems and short stories we assigned in advance. Third, an underlying inquiry into the ways culture is shaped by environment seems central to the characters' stories in the novel, including the non-Native characters. These three strands, we hoped, would provide the structure for our first day's discussion, moving from students' recognition of the landscape to ecological issues concurrent with our reading to characterization to history and so on.
        On the very first day of class, we established an emphasis on "storytelling," on narrative. We accomplished this by telling our own stories of how we came to be teaching a class such as this and why we thought it necessary to do so. In other words, from the very beginning there was a blurring of the binary between "fiction" and lived experience, as well as a blurring of the college class and the world surrounding our classroom. This personal introduction was followed by readings from our anthology that included N. Scott Momaday's "Man Made of Words," Greg Sarris's "The Woman Who Loved a Snake," Kim Blaeser's "The Possibilities of a Native Poetics," Leslie Silko's "Yellow Woman," and several stories and poems by Louise Erdrich. The centrality of narrative to culture was thus highlighted, and issues of identity emerged as well.
        We also read Thomas King's short story "Borders," taking the concept of identity into the political realm. Issues of representation were raised, particularly after the class viewed Victor Masayesva's wonderful movie Imagining Indians. Imagined ideas about western landscapes are also exposed in D'Arcy McNickle's short story "The Hawk Is Hungry," and given McNickle's influence on contemporary writers like Owens, we read the story early in the term. Thus, as the first {52} weeks progressed, the students were presented with several perspectives of the history between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures, capped wonderfully with Carter Revard's witty story "Report to the Nation: Repossessing Europe."
        There are a few other pieces that helped frame the discussion: Silko's "Tony's Story" and Simon Ortiz's "The Killing of a State Cop," both of which fictionalize an historical event. We also read Susan Castillo's "Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy," which examines the contexts for Silko's scathing review of Erdrich's The Beet Queen. This was followed by the first midterm, essay exam. Over one-third of the class wrote about issues of representation, an understandable direction of inquiry, given the questions raised by these pieces.
        This introduction thus provided the scope necessary to move into the novel. By the time students read Wolfsong, they had engaged the history and the issues it evokes. Interestingly, on the first day of discussion there was little focus on the land; it was the shared "given" for the students, so an analysis of its depiction was deferred, coming later in explorations of economic, ecological, and political issues. However, this is not to suggest that the locale did not speak personally to the students as they reexamined their own landscape in the context of the narrative. Suffice it to say here that the students immediately moved into character analyses (and thus identity considerations), looking primarily at the book's protagonist, Tom Joseph, and his brother, Jimmy, but also Tom's former partner, Karen. In brief, they focused immediately on the characters with whom they most closely aligned by age or perhaps by personal experience or by similarity of situation: Tom Joseph leaves his home town behind to seek a university education, only to return to a home very much changed to "find himself."
        On the second day of discussion, we formed small groups to draft the questions students would pose to Owens. It was a lively discussion, after the first moments of hesitation, and as we moved about among the groups, it became obvious that the groups moved quite rapidly from the usual, superficial questions one hears so often during the question-and-answer sessions after readings to ones of substance that {53} were directly related to elements specific to the novel as well as our own personal reactions to it. In brief, then, it seems that they clearly saw this as an opportunity to gain information and insight that would be of immediate benefit (i.e., be useful in a graded exercise) but also that the focus of the papers as they were conceiving them had become almost personal. Interestingly, the student questions for Owens addressed the relationship between culture and place.

        THE STUDENTS' QUESTIONS, THE AUTHOR'S ANSWERS

These questions were first gen