General Editors: Helen Jaskoski and Robert M. Nelson
Poetry/Fiction: Joseph W. Bruchac III
Bibliographer: Jack W. Marken
Editor Emeritus: Karl Kroeber
Assistant to the Editor: Sharon M. Dilloway

SAIL - Studies in American Indian Literatures is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures. The journal publishes reviews, interviews, bibliographies, creative work including transcriptions of performances, and scholarly and theoretical articles on any aspect of American Indian literature including traditional oral material in dual-language format or translation, written works, and live and media performances of verbal art.

SAIL is published quarterly. Individual subscription rates for Volume 3 (1991) are $12 domestic and $16 foreign; institutional rates are $16 domestic and $20 foreign. All payments must be in U.S. dollars. Limited quantities of volumes 1 (1989) are available to individuals at $16 the volume and to institutions at $24 the volume.

Manuscripts should follow MLA format; please submit three copies with SASE to
Helen Jaskoski
SAIL
Department of English
California State University Fullerton
Fullerton, California 92634

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Joseph Bruchac, Poetry/Fiction Editor
The Greenfield Review Press
2 Middle Grove Avenue
Greenfield Center, New York 12833

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Copyright SAIL. After first printing in SAIL copyright reverts to the author.
ISSN: 0730-3238

Production of this issue supported by the University of Richmond.

INTRODUCTION
         Lawrence Abbott, Issue Editor         .                  .                  .          1

FOUR DIRECTIONS: SOME THOUGHTS ON TEACHING NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE
         Joseph W. Bruchac, III                     .                  .                  .          2

THE HEURISTIC POWERS OF INDIAN LITERATURES: WHAT NATIVE AUTHORSHIP DOES TO MAINSTREAM TEXTS
         Kenneth M. Roemer      .                  .                  .                  .          8

TRUSTING STORY AND READING THE SURROUNDED
         Bill Brown                   .                  .                  .                  .          22

AMERICAN INDIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND WRITTEN COMPOSITION: A COURSE PROPOSAL
         David Sudol                  .                   .                  .                  .          28

A NAVAJO HIGH SCHOOL AND THE TRUTH OF TREES
         Roger Dunsmore           .                  .                   .                  .         36

LETTING THEM TEACH EACH OTHER: AN EXPERIMENT IN CLASSROOM NETWORKING
         Gary Griffith and Lucy Maddox       .                    .                  .         41

COMMENTARY
         From the Editors           .                   .                  .                  .          51

REVIEWS

Books Without Bias: Through Indian Eyes. Ed. Beverly Slapin and Doris Seale.
Teaching the Native American. Ed. Hap Gilliland, Jon Reyhner, and Rachel Schaffer
         Lawrence J. Abbott       .                  .                  .                   .         53

{iii}
Indian School Days. Basil H. Johnston
         Robley Evans                .                  .                  .                  .         55

Ojibway Heritage. Basil H. Johnston
         Louise Mengelkoch        .                  .                 .                   .         58

Ojibway Ceremonies. Basil H. Johnston.
         Carol A. Miller              .                  .                  .                  .         60

The Sun Came Down: The History of the World as My Blackfeet Elders Told It. Percy Bullchild
         Sidner J. Larson             .                  .                  .                   .         62

Cross-Cultural Teaching Tales. Ed. Judith Kleinfeld
         Jon Reyhner                   .                  .                  .                  .         64

Coyote Stories. Mourning Dove
Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Ed. Jay Miller
         Alanna K. Brown           .                  .                   .                  .         66

A second view of Coyote Stories
         Bette S. Weidman          .                  .                  .                  .         70

Circle of Motion: Arizona Anthology of Contemporary American Indian Literature. Ed. Kathleen Mullen Sands
         Lawrence J. Evers          .                  .                   .                  .          73

Wordways: The Novels of D'Arcy McNickle. John Lloyd Purdy
         James Ruppert                .                  .                   .                  .         75

Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor
         Two views: Pauline Woodward, Bonnie J. Barthold              .          78

Native American Literatures. Ed. Laura Coltelli
         Three views: James H. Maguire, Birgit Hans, Arnold Krupat            82

CONTRIBUTORS               .                  .                  .                  .         90

{1}

        Along with the obvious revolution in thinking about what constitutes the canon in American literature, there has been a parallel, if quieter, revolution in pedagogy, about how we teach what we teach and why we teach what we teach. Not only must previously devalued texts be incorporated into various curricula in schools and colleges, but there must also be acknowledgment that these newly valorized materials (from the academy's perspective, of course; the texts were always valued by the People) require new ways of reading. Past problems with inclusivity and exclusivity may have had more to do with the reading of Native literatures than with the literatures themselves.
        Pedagogy, properly defined, extends well beyond what is done in class for fifty minutes three times a week for fifteen weeks. Effective pedagogy involves personal valuing of the works taught, openness to the responses of others, an ongoing willingness to question working assumptions about what one is doing, and a desire to create a learning community. Pedagogy, like education (educare), rejects foreclosure of students or texts.
        This issue of SAIL highlights the diverse nature of pedagogy. Joseph Bruchac reminds us of right ways of approaching Native texts. His essay illustrates the need for teachers to ground their teaching in respect and care for what is taught. Lucy Maddox and Gary Griffith discuss important challenges facing education today: the forming of partnerships with schools, especially schools serving reservations. Relationships and exchanges with schools can become a powerful force for change in American education generally. Kenneth Roemer's essay raises valuable questions about authorship, suggesting that explicit teaching about the concept of authorship can be a useful starting point for the study of Native literatures, and can in turn lead to new ways of reading. Bill Brown's analysis of the use of stories in The Surrounded reveals that the meaning of stories and the storytelling tradition can help elucidate texts for readers and provide textual coherence to students new to Native works. Roger Dunsmore's deeply felt response to his Navajo students' insights leads to the kind of re-examination of all literature that Ken Roemer theorizes about. Finally, David Sudol makes the all-important connections between rhetoric, literature and personal experience in his outline for an autobiography-based writing course.
        Where scholarship is "global," teaching is often "local," teachers working with students and texts in relative isolation. Such books as Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs and Approaches to Teaching "The Way to Rainy Mountain" (among others) indicate that teaching methods and approaches can be "globalized." This issue of SAIL, we hope, will continue that trend.

{2}

        My own first experiences in teaching American Indian literature came after three years in West Africa. I returned to the United States in 1969 and found myself at Skidmore College near my home town of Greenfield Center, New York, an instructor with little chance of tenure who had been given a job because there was a last-minute opening at the school. That was okay with me. My main objective had been to come home to my Abenaki grandfather in whose house I'd been raised. He lived only three miles east from the college, an easy ride on a bicycle through the hills and backroads at the edge of the Kaydeross Range. As I rode from the dawn towards the west I passed fields which had been filled with Mohawk corn, and within my line of sight to the north were the mountains and the old, still hidden burial places of some of my own ancestors. The road passed a stone's throw from samp mortars worn deep into bedrock where corn and acorns had been ground into flour for thousands of years. Just south of that road were streams where my grandfather and I caught trout and said words of thanks to the fish spirits. Somehow, being home made it easier to be a "low man on the academic totem pole"--one of their favorite images, no irony intended--teaching freshman composition and little else. It was in 1970 that the first Native American literature course was taught at Skidmore, during their one-month winter term. I wasn't allowed to teach it, though by then I was being allowed to teach a single course in Black Literature. "Topics in American Indian Literature" was taught by a senior faculty member who used a lot of work from anthropologists and a little contemporary Indian writing. He used Kroeber's The Inland Whale, some creation stories, threw in a few poems by poets who were Indian. He tried his best and he consulted with me--with apologies.
        "You ought to be teaching this, Joseph, but you know how it is."
        "Totem pole?" I said.
        He nodded, without irony. "You understand."
        Along the way he set up a reading. One of those who spoke was Harry W. Paige, whose book, Songs of the Teton Sioux, had been his Ph.D. thesis at the State University of New York at Albany for his doctorate in English--the first doctorate in English from SUNY/Albany. Harry's book wasn't bad, and it was a result of a lot of time spent among the Teton Sioux. He gave his talk, followed by Duane McGinnis (not yet Niatum) and myself. Duane had been invited to campus to talk to that special one-time-only Native American literature course and I was, after all, of Indian descent and had published a few things here and there. In the audience that night was William Fenton, whose lifetime of study of the Iroquois was evidenced by many books and articles and the emeritus chair of anthro-{3}pology at the same SUNY/Albany that gave Paige his degree. In fact, I'm pretty sure Bill Fenton was there for Paige--not Duane and myself. After the readings and talk, the question and answer session got around to such things as vocables in traditional songs--"nonsense words," as Fenton put it--and storytelling traditions. "There are," Fenton said, "no more traditional Iroquois storytellers. I knew the last one and he died some years ago." There was some disagreement that night, and I leave it to your imagination as to which two people were the most vocal in their disagreeing.
        I begin at Skidmore and with those details because I feel it sets the scene for my own directions as a writer of Native American literature and a teacher of the literature of Native Americans. Those details also lend themselves well to some points I'd like to make about teaching Native American literature. First, however, another story.
        Not long ago, I was invited to do a storytelling program at a college in Vermont. While there, I had dinner with several people who have been teaching Native American literature in college. Our conversation was an illuminating one for me, because it pointed out how widespread the teaching of Native American literature is becoming and just how needed are some directions in HOW and WHAT to teach in such courses. One of the people said that he was having a hard time finding texts. Another said that he was using Frederick Turner's 1973 volume The Portable Native American Reader and beginning with Creation myths, but that he had some misgivings about the accuracy of the translations, though he didn't know enough to know for sure how good they were. The third teacher of Native American literature mentioned taking a course in how to teach Native American literature from a certain professor. Someone else at the table knew that professor and mentioned that when she taught Native American literature as a visiting profesor at their school the few Native American students on campus had signed up for the course but all dropped it because they found something objectionable about it. No one knew what.
        I do a lot of listening in such conversations. Partly because I was raised to listen and partly because when academic conversations start it isn't that easy to break into them. Even when people ask you a direct question they often try to answer it themselves before you can open your mouth. So I waited. These people I was having dinner with were good folks and their interest and their concern were very real. When you're ready to listen, I thought. When it is quiet enough. And when it was quiet enough, I began to say a few words about how I have approached the teaching of Native American literature. And unless you've lost patience by now with my slow developing style, you're about to read some of those words.
        When we speak about Native American literature today it is, in many ways, like speaking of African literature. More accurately, it is how speaking about African literature would be if we were living {4} in an Africa which had lost 90% of its population in the last 500 years and was being run as a single united continent by European colonials. As is the case with Africa, when we speak of "Native American Literature," of "American Indian Literature" or (as they say in Canada) "Native Literature," we are speaking of many literatures, especially when we refer to that work which comes from what might loosely be called (though there were, in fact, a number of writing and mnemonic recording systems in North America) "Oral Tradition." Just as Zulu oral poetry from southern Africa is very different from the traditions of the griots of Mali in the northwest of Africa, the Haudenosaunee (as the "Iroquois" call themselves) epic of the founding of their Great League of Peace is not at all like the deer songs of the Yaqui.
        When you approach the totality of "Native American Literature," you are confronted by an incredibly vast body of work. It comes out of (in just the area now called the continental United States) more than 400 different languages and distinct cultures. It is thousands of years old. Yet, without any special preparation, without any real grounding in the cultures which produced those many literatures, without any familiarity with the languages from which they were translated (seldom by native speakers and all-too-often translated in very slipshod and inappropriate ways) teachers on the university (and even high school) level are expected to teach this "Native American Literature." Not only that, most of those teachers have never visited a Native American community or spoken with a single Native American. It is, to say the least, daunting. To put it another way, as one of my friends and teachers, a Pueblo elder known to the world as "Swift Eagle," said, "It's dumb!"
        The first full-fledged Native American literature course I taught was in a maximum security prison. I was, by then, no longer in Skidmore's English Department. My terminal contract had been terminated. Other job opportunities in other parts of America had been possible, but I wasn't about to leave my native soil again. Eventually, I'd been rehired by Skidmore's external degree program to develop and direct a college program at Great Meadow Correctional Facility. I stayed with that job for eight years. In addition to being an administrator, I taught a course now and then. African Literature, Black Literature, and finally, in 1975, Introduction to Native American Literature.
        If I'd had my druthers, I would have begun any Native American Literature course not in the classroom, but in the woods. (That would have been just fine insofar as the men in my class at Great Meadow went. They understood what I meant, but that got almost as big a laugh from them as the proposed course in Astronomy at the prison which was nixed by the Deputy Superintendent in charge of Security when the professor said that field trips outside at night would be necessary.) It was important, I told that class, to have a sense of the American earth, of the land and the people as one. I {5} divided the syllabus into four directions and focussed on the literary traditions of one paricular Native nation from each corner of the continent. To the east we looked at the People of the Long House, the Haudenosaunee. We began with poems written in English by Maurice Kenny and Peter Blue Cloud before turning to the epic story of the Founding of the Great League, listening to recordings of Mohawk social dance songs as we did so. To the south, we began with poems by Leslie Silko and Simon Ortiz and we read Silko's Ceremony and Momaday's House Made of Dawn in the context of the healing traditions of Navajo and Pueblo cultures. To the North we looked at James Welch's novel Winter in the Blood. To the west we focussed on translations of Lakota and Cheyenne traditional songs while we read Lance Henson's poetry. Again, as with the Iroquois material, we listened to the music of the people, including not just grass dance songs, but also Floyd Westerman singing "Custer Died for Your Sins." We looked at maps of America (and allowing any maps into the prison was a major struggle), and we talked about history, from east to west, from north to south. It was one of the best classes I'd ever taught, and I still have some of the papers written by those men.
        Although there have been other courses in Native American literature that I have taught since then--in seminar courses for senior citizens, at Hamilton College and at the State University of New York at Albany--and a great deal of new Native American work and work about Native American literature has come into print, I have not really changed my approach to teaching Native American literature. There are four simple directions that I follow (in addition to those cardinal ones) and I would suggest them as applicable for others who wish to teach Native American literature.

        1. Clearly define what you mean by "Native American Literature." Remember the breadth and diversity of what we call "American Indian." Remember that we are referring, in fact, to many nations within this nation; to many literatures, literatures which each come from a national identity and a strong sense of place. You might make a good case that contemporary Native American writing in English is one continuous literary body, but when you look at the influence of the old traditions and then look at those traditions themselves, you recognize that you're seeing just the tip of the iceberg.
        To my mind, it is best to teach introductory courses focussing on the work written in English, to think of these courses as only the beginning and to hope for both the knowledgeable instructors and the opportunity for schools to offer more advanced studies--a course in Haudenosaunee Literature 301 or Momaday 405--just as we offer introductory courses in British Literature and then give our advanced students a chance to study the Victorians or Shakespeare.
{6}
        2. Teach the work in context. The Native American view of life as reflected in literature (whether in English or originally in an earlier native language) is holistic. Remember that, if you are teaching Native American literature well you are not just teaching literature, you are also teaching culture. To understand the work--or to begin to understand it--it must be seen as it was used. The word is regarded as alive, not just syllables and symbols. An understanding, for example, of the traditional Navajo Night Chant is impossible without knowing the place of the Night Chant in the practices of healing, without recognizing that it is only one part of an event which involves the participation of dozens or even hundreds of individuals, that it is meant to be sung in a certain place at a certain time and that the making of a sand painting depicting a particular event in Navajo mythology is intimately connected to it. Similarly, it is difficult to teach a modern work such as Silko's Ceremony without some awareness of the place and purpose of similar healing and storytelling traditions among the Pueblo people.
        3. Pay attention to continuance. Be aware of the strong connections in all Native American writing between what the western world calls "past" and "present." I am not just talking about the awareness of literary tradition--though that works at least in part as an analogy--but of something more than that. Many of the native languages deal with "time" in a very different way than does English. Similarly, the time sense of many contemporary Native American novels can seem strange, circuitous, even circular. Continuance is an important word for me in dealing with Native American writing. I stress this continuance by constantly linking contemporary Native writers to their roots, to their people and their places, their traditions.
        4. Be wary of work in translation. My own approach is, for introductory courses at least, to place the strongest emphasis on contemporary work written in English and to use a few carefully selected translations from the old traditions in direct relation to those newer writings. A great many stories, songs, ceremonies and the like which can be found in books are flawed in many ways. In some cases, the translations are bowdlerized or inaccurate. Imagine what it would be like if Shakespeare's plays had been written in Lakota and we only knew his work in English through a single translation of Othello done by an 18th century puritanical and racist Baptist missionary with a tin ear who transcribed the play from a verbal recounting of it by a slightly senile octogenarian who never liked the theatre that much. From my own knowledge of certain Native American languages and some of the translations that have been foisted off as legitimate, I can assure you that I am not exaggerating the injustices that have been done. In some cases, in fact, rather than translations, the so-called myths and legends that we find in {7} any number of places are sometimes made up from the whole cloth--oft involving a tragic love between a boy from one tribe and a girl from another and either a lover's leap or a canoe going over whatever high waterfall is handy to the translator's fevered imagination.
        Another point about work in translation to keep in mind is that some things which have been recorded or translated have been recorded or translated without the permission of the native people who own that work. Much of Native America's traditional culture is living in the strongest sense of that word. Revealing that culture to the uninitiated is sacrilegious. A good teacher of Native American literature needs to know enough to be able to know which works need to be shown special respect. I cannot emphasize that word respect strongly enough. In some cases it may even mean NOT discussing something. That is a hard direction for people with the western mindset to follow, that western mindset which says "tell it all, show it all, explain it all." I feel that those with that mindset would be better off avoiding the teaching of Native American literature.
        When using Native American literature in translation, it is safest to use work which has been translated by Native scholars themselves. Alfonso Ortiz and J. N. B. Hewitt are two examples. There are also a number of ethnologists whose reputations and whose relations with the people whose work they translated are quite reputable. Dennis Tedlock and Frances Densmore represent some of the best in contemporary and early 20th century work. I also like to have access to both the English translation and the original language. Then, even a non-native speaker can have some sense of the sound and rhythms as they were meant to be. But, again, show respect. Walk slowly. Listen to Native people.
        Native American literature, as we now have the chance to offer it, is more than just an extra area, more than just a little diversity for the curriculum. It is the literature of a continent (of two continents, in fact, but I'll confine myself to the area north of Mexico for now), and it is a literature continually growing, being created and rediscovered. It is said that when Columbus touched onto the island of Hispaniola he didn't know where he really was. He didn't have, you might say, a good sense of direction. I certainly hope that future teachers of Native American literature will at least avoid that mistake of a European coming into contact with something new. I hope they will see where they are, see which way is south, which way is west, which way is north and which way to look if they want to see the light of dawn.

{8}

        Teachers begin the 1990s with greater access to Indian literatures than ever before. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff's American Studies International Bibliography of Indian Literatures (32-52) and her new MLA book, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography, list videotapes, numerous collections of narratives, songs, ceremonies, and speeches, as well as hundreds of works by individual poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, autobiographers, and historians. Influential publishing houses like McGraw Hill, St. Martins, and Norton include Native American works in their American literature anthologies. The editors of The American Experience, a high school anthology (Prentice Hall 1989), The Harper American Literature (Harper 1987), American Literature: A Prentice Hall Anthology, 2 (Prentice Hall, 1991; which includes all of The Way to Rainy Mountain), and especially The Heath Anthology of American Literature (Heath 1990) have made strong efforts to offer Indian oral and written texts to students. But availability doesn't solve an essential (and essentially disturbing) problem for teachers who want to include examples of Indian literatures in American or World literature courses. These instructors must strive to achieve two apparently contradictory goals: the articulation of fundamental differences between Native and mainstream texts; and the delineation of significant ways that Indian and non-Indian texts can speak to one another.
        Teachers and scholars who ignore the cultural, historical, aesthetic, linguistic, and, in the cases of oral literatures, the performance contexts of Native texts risk making ludicrous or even sacrilegious mistakes. And their students will unwittingly be participating in a form of racism that permits the entrance of "different" perspectives only if they are reformulated into familiar images and concepts. Indian texts become red apples with conveniently thin veneers of the exotic that, once pierced, reveal familiar white (and often male) themes of Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Society, Alienation, etc., rendered accessible by established New Critical or other commonly used interpretive strategies.
        A consistent emphasis in the separateness--the different-ness--of Indian literatures can lead to equally serious academic and ethical problems: forms of literary ghettoization and tokenism, or, to borrow Peter Carafiol's phrase, transformations of tokens into totems (632). In the latter case, teachers present Indian texts as being so different that they become incomparable to mainstream works and inaccessible to criteria routinely applied to non-Indian {9} literatures. Students may leave such classes perceiving Native American texts as curious objects on the American literary landscape--exotic anomalies to "get through" and then "forget" because they don't "fit." Colleagues who are aware of this process can, furthermore, ridicule the teacher (and by implication the Indian literatures) for not having the courage to let the Native texts "stand next to" familiar classics and "stand up to" established literary standards.¹
        Elsewhere, I have suggested several ways to negotiate the frustrating demands of fostering students' awareness of fundamental differences, while still creating opportunities for Indian texts to become part of dynamic intertextual and cross-cultural dialogues.² In this essay, I will focus on an approach that deserves more attention: the provocative, heuristic potential of teaching Indian literatures in surveys of American or World literatures.
        Pretend that Native American literatures are not ignored or peripherally situated on the margins of the American literary canon, but instead are placed right at the center of literary surveys and critical debates. What types of questions would the Native texts generate? How could the "Otherness" or "differentness" of Indian literatures sensitize scholars, teachers, and students to important issues that they should be asking about all texts but may not have been, or if they asked they were content with familiar or superficial answers?
        For example, who really is the author? Or on more fundamental levels, who "speaks" a text and what are the "origins" of texts? Despite attempts of some New Critics to teach texts in a vacuum and some post-structuralists to transform radically standard concepts of authorship, most English teachers and students still perceive the "validity and value" of literature" in terms of texts and [individual] authors" (Hegeman 271; for a provocative critique of selected post-structuralist concepts of authorship, see Vitanza 15-23). Unfortunately, in lower-level survey courses, these teachers (myself included) typically answer the question of authorship by drawing attention to a brief headnote or by offering a few "biographical facts" in a lecture. These minimal efforts can reinforce simplistic notions of individual acts of creation--images of isolated and inspired authors dashing off clusters of brilliant phrases that become our Classics.
        Powerful alternative images of the origins of literature, capable of transforming, replacing, or at least complementing romantic notions of authorship, can be discovered by students introduced to several examples of Indian literature in a survey course. The variety of the concepts of textual origins is so great and the nature of those concepts often so different that teachers and students are practically forced to consider basic questions about authors and origins that they may have ignored previously. Once this questioning has begun, it should be easy to carry the process of discovery over to discussions of non-Indian texts.
{10}
        To suggest how this process can work, I will offer several examples that I have found particularly useful for raising questions about authorship in survey courses. Anthology tables of contents and course book adoptions suggest that most teachers who include Indian texts in surveys tend to select works by twentieth-century Native American poets and novelists who publish in English (Wiget, "Identity" 4), selections that reflect their training. I will, therefore, focus on modern, written texts. I will, however, conclude by examining a well-known as-told-to autobiography and a famous ceremony. Even though these forms of literature may be unfamiliar and even threatening to survey teachers and students, they represent the most profound challenges to simplistic notions of authorship.
        I hope my brief examples will encourage teachers and scholars to reverse or at least modify an understandable but limiting process: approaching Indian literatures by consistently imposing themes from non-Indian literatures on to the Native texts or by routinely using non-Indian theoretical orientations to interpret Native texts. Both approaches can be useful, but, when practiced exclusively, they can also lead to confusion and to literary colonialism. Using Indian texts as central paradigms and as sources of important questions can, on the other hand, enhance the study of Native American literatures while also transforming our views of non-Indian literatures in stimulating ways.

Love Medicine (1984), The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Storyteller (1981)--titles on book covers that ride above the names Erdrich, Momaday, and Silko that seem to answer the authorship question. Yet, as most specialists in contemporary Indian fiction would agree, each of these works and names raises intricate questions about authorship in general and specifically about "Indian" or "Native American" authorship.
        In several interviews, but especially in one conducted by Kay Bonetti for American Audio Prose Library in 1986, Louise Erdrich has explained authorship as partnership. Before and during drafting stages she and her husband, educator and author Michael Dorris, discuss potential characters, narrative strategies, and themes. Like method actors and actresses, they even act out characters. In restaurants, for instance, they might try to imagine what and how a Nector Kashpaw or Lulu Nanapush would order, wear, or act. The actual drafting is more of a solitary business. "Michael works in one room and I work in the other"; "[w]e're collaborators, but we're also individual writers" (Bruchac interview 83, 85). The initial drafter gets his or her name on the cover. Thus, Erdrich's name is on Love Medicine, The Beet Queen (1986), and Tracks (1988), and will be on the forthcoming American Horse, even though it was Dorris's idea to make a four-book series out of their twentieth-century narrative of the Plains. After the first drafting, the non-drafter goes over every page, paragraph, and word alone and in {11} consultation with the drafter. Possibly the most concise and most moving expression of their authorship appears a the dedication of A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), which Dorris drafted:

        The Erdrich-Dorris collaboration raises fascinating questions about co-authorships. To what degree do the texts gain or lose "authority" as feminine, masculine, or androgynous texts because of the collaboration? Do early stressful situations mold long-lasting composition processes? In this case, did the trying circumstances under which "The World's Greatest Fisherman" was written (see Bonetti interview) and the quick and striking success of that story (including a $5,000 prize) establish a psychological/creative pattern--a paradigm fashioned under fire and then set by a glow of recognition? After all, that story played a key role in generating Love Medicine, and that book began the four-book series. Or to what degree was their writing relationship influenced by family habits and tribal traditions of consultation?
        Despite his stay at Taos, I doubt that D. H. Lawrence's concept of authorship was radically altered by tribal traditions. Nonetheless, in comparative literature courses, the Erdrich-Dorris relationship could be used to sensitize students to the influence of Frieda on D. H.'s writing. In an American literature course, an Erdrich-Dorris book could encourage questions about the Zelda-F. Scott Fitzgerald relationship or about the literary, gender, and cultural implications of the many times, in their correspondence, Twain and Howells noted the roles of their wives as editors and censors. Of course, these investigations need not be limited to husband-and-wife teams. The Erdrich-Dorris instance could stimulate discussions of the Eliot-Pound collaboration on The Waste Land (1922) or of many other collaborations that examine the origins and results of two relatives or close friends co-creating a written text.
        The case of Momaday's authorship of The Way to Rainy Mountain includes and goes beyond relatives, friends, and writing. Momaday's "The Man Made of Words," chapters and articles written by Matthias Schubnell (140-66), Kenneth Lincoln, Hertha D. Wong ("Contemporary"), David H. Brumble (165-80), and me (e.g., "Survey"), and several parts of Approaches to Teaching Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain" (e.g., 24-46) have outlined the communal acts of authorship that created the three voices of the book. The tribal and family storytelling voices grew out of childhood memories of hearing many family members, especially his father, tell him Kiowa stories as timeless as when the Kiowa emerged from a hollow log and as recent as events in his grandparents' lives. These remembered tellings were reinforced during the mid-1960s when Momaday retraced the migration route of his {12} people, visited his grandmother's grave, and, with the help of his father, collected stories and history from the tribal elders honored in his acknowledgements. In an interview conducted by Charles L. Woodard, Momaday notes that only in a very limited sense can he be considered the author of the stories: "I can take credit for setting down those Kiowa stories in English . . . , but I didn't invent them. The imagination that informs those stories is really not mine, though it exists, I think, in my blood. It's an ancestral imagination" (57). In collaboration with D. E. Carlsen and Bruce S. McCurdy, 33 lyric versions of these stories appeared in the privately printed The Journey of Tai-me (1967). (See also Momaday, "Kiowa Legends.")
        The historical and personal voices on the recto pages are closer to being Momaday's own creative acts, but they are still communally authored in several senses. The historical voices often draw upon Kiowa elders' memories and written sources; Momaday especially acknowledges the use of James Mooney's Calendar History (1898).³ Yvor Winters, Momaday's mentor and friend at Stanford, encouraged him to experiment with multiple-voices or, as he wrote in a letter to Momaday, "controlled associations" (Schubnell 143-44). Although to my knowledge it has never been noted in print, the personal voice is also collaborative. Natachee Scott Momaday, Momaday's mother, took an active role in helping him to remember many of the childhood experiences that he used in Rainy Mountain and The Names (Momaday, "Response"). Even the visual impact of the book had collaborative origins. As the title page announces, Momaday's father, Al, illustrated the book. Hidden on the back of the last page, we find an equally important announcement: "Designed by Bruce Gentry." This talented University of New Mexico designer selected the three type styles, placed the story voices on the verso and the two commentary voices on the recto pages, and sent the words "RAINY MOUNTAIN THE WAY T/O RAINY MOUNTAIN THE WAY" on their journey across the bottoms of facing pages. (In some paper copies, the "T/O" disappears into the gutter of the book.)
        Does all this collaboration mean that we should strip Momaday's name from the cover and replace it with "A Host of Thousands Stretching Back to the Time Dogs Could Talk"? Of course not. If for nothing else, Momaday deserves the title author for the inventive genius it took to conceive of and execute the multi-voiced structure. (We might also allow him a bit of credit for crafting almost a hundred pages of lyric prose with framing poems!) But the "author" of Rainy Mountain clearly can not be defined by the isolated, individual writer model. Authorship in Rainy Mountain more closely resembles post-structuralist concepts of authors who speak "by virtues of conventions of discourse situations, contexts, interpretive communities" (Vitanza 19) or models of authorship that can be associated with tribal storytelling traditions (Brumble 168-80). Gary Kodaseet, an important contemporary Kiowa leader, recently defined {13} such a storytelling model as he articulated his response to Rainy Mountain. He noted that the structure reminded him of the familiar storytelling sessions of his childhood. Someone might tell an ancient story about "our beginning, [or] the stories of the ten bundles." But people also "told family histories" and personal memories (Roemer, Approaches 148-49). (It's interesting to note that one of the early reviews of Erdrich's Love Medicine compared the narrative structure of that book to a "family reunion in a crowded kitchen" [Sanders 7].)
        Although Laguna and Acoma stories (including stories found in Ceremony and the "Estoy-eh-muut" narrative that unifies Silko's film Arrowboy and the Witches) are important parts of Storyteller, the communal tribal voice is not quite as obvious in Silko's book as it is in Momaday's. Nonetheless, in a survey course, Storyteller can become a paradigm for a concept of self defined communally and open to a great variety of different voices. The title of the book helps to define Silko as a storyteller. For her, storytelling is a communal role, not only because sharing a tale requires an audience, but also because Silko conceives of storytelling as a group activity: "Traditionally, everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest person, was expected to listen and to be able to tell a portion, if only a small detail, from a narrative account or story. Thus, the remembering and retelling were a communal process" (qtd. in Krupat, Voice 163).
        Arnold Krupat (Voice 161-70) and Hertha Wong ("Orality") have argued convincingly that this process in Storyteller encompasses an exciting diversity of forms and voices. The forms include letters, short fictions expressing lyric, mythic, comic, and other tones (e.g., "Lullaby," "Yellow Woman," "Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hand"), poetry, Laguna responses to her work (110), childhood memories often in poetic form, and wonderful photographs taken primarily by her father but also by grandpa Hank and a friend, Denny Carr. The mingling of voices comes from many family storytellers like Aunt Susie but also from and to Indians (the Hopi storyteller Helen Sekaquaptewa) and non-Indians (James Wright) outside the family. And then there are the implied voices of the photographs. In captions (269-79) Silko gives voice to these images; several of the captions are actually stories in their own right (e.g., nos. 11, 271). The overall result is a sense of textual origins built out of a rich network of identifications with relatives, landscapes, and of course, stories.
        Introducing students to authorship in Rainy Mountain and Storyteller can help them to understand several intricate Native American autobiographies written since Rainy Mountain appeared (e.g., Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's Then Badger Said This) and many of the recent Alaskan autobiographies and contributions to Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat's I Tell You Now (1987) (Brumble 178-80). Examining Rainy Mountain and Storyteller can also encourage students to {14} ponder the fine lines between translator and author in works by Ezra Pound, between teller/collector of stories and writer in novels by Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and Zora Neal Hurston, between individual and group voices in communities as small as the Black Mountain Poets and as large as Jewish-American writers. Students should also be more sensitive to the visual dimensions of authorship, whether visuals are a crucial part of the marketing strategy, as was the case with Mark Twain's books sold by subscription, or become more personal statements, as in William Blake's illustrated volumes.
        Before we move from contemporary works written in English to as-told-to autobiographies and ceremonial literature, one other general authorship issue deserves emphasis, especially in the cases of Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and many other poets and novelists with mixed cultural heritages. What constitutes an "Indian" or "Native American" author? The mid-1980s controversy over Jamake Highwater recharged this issue (see Adams and Anderson), but I've been haunted by the question ever since someone whispered to me in a conference hall that so-and-so didn't have "a drop of Indian blood" and when a professor blurted out at a 1970s MLA session that Momaday was not an Indian--"After all, he has a Ph.D.!"
        In his introduction to an excellent collection of contemporary prose and poetry, The Remembered Earth (1979, 1980), Geary Hobson offers a variety of ways to define Indian authors but focuses on a sensible construct: "those of Native American blood and background who affirm their heritage in individual ways" (10). He also stresses the importance of the "tribe's, or [Indian] community's, judgment"(8). In many of his writings but especially in "The Man Made of Words" and The Names, Momaday adds the importance of how the writer imagines him or herself. One of his primary examples is his mother, a respected teacher and writer. As a sixteen-year-old, she decided to assert her (one-eighth) Cherokee identity over her Southern belle image and went on to Haskell College, marriage to a Kiowa, and teaching on reservations (Names 23-25; Brumble 174). As Erdrich has asserted, when you have a mixed heritage, "[y]ou must make choices" (Bruchac interview 83).
        Questions about Indian authorship go beyond blood and background to include matters of audience, language, form and topic. A clear-cut response to audience definition comes from Jack Forbes: "Native American literature must consist in works produced by persons of Native identity and/or culture for primary dissemination to other persons of Native identity and/or culture" (19; see also Krupat, Voice 203-08). Despite the "and/or" hedging, this definition would eliminate from consideration as types of Indian literatures most of the works of contemporary Indian writers, including full-bloods like James Welch and Simon Ortiz, and many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century sermons, histories, poems, and stories.
        Form and topic also raise questions. Because they employ repeti-{15}tion with variation to examine Indian identity, are Momaday's "Delight Song of Tsoai-talee" and Joy Harjo's "She Had Some Horses" more Indian than Harjo's free verse poem "Anchorage" or Momaday's poems about Russia? Or are all Momaday's and Harjo's poems informed by Indian perspectives? And if they are, is this perspective so broad that it is similar to perspectives used by many non-Indian authors? Along similar lines of query, how much difference is there between the landscape and small-town poems of Carter Revard and Jim Barnes and the poems that Anglo poets write about the Southwest? How do Erdrich's primarily white town of Argus and Momaday's all-white hero Billy the Kid figure into the Native landscape? And where does that landscape begin and end, considering the high percentage of mixed heritages among Indians and the fact that more than half of the Indian population lives in urban areas and speaks English?
        Of course, all these questions, at least indirectly, provoke the basic question of the advantages and disadvantages--for writers and readers--of the concept of an Indian author. Writers often gain attention, authority, respect, and distinction because they are perceived as Indians, and readers often use their knowledge of an author's Indianness to allay knotty questions of authenticity (see Hegeman 269-71). Nevertheless, the label "Indian author" can, as suggested above, severely limit authorial freedom and readers' expectations and interpretations. In a performance context, the latter was dramatized at a big Indian arts fair in Arlington, Texas in 1990. A Kiowa "Indian performer," Thomas Ware, dressed traditionally and played ancient flute songs. A large crowd listened politely. Then he put on a hat and shades, plugged in his guitar, and played the blues (better than he had played the flute). The crowd departed. I doubt that type of audience would be interested in hearing Joy Harjo play the tenor sax (which she does well) if she had been announced as an "Indian performer."
        Because discussing Indian authorship can be so frustrating and so sensitive, many teachers may be tempted to avoid the whole issue, and thus miss marvelous opportunities to raise questions about categorizing authors, authorial freedom, and reading conventions. After discussing the controversies over Indian authorship, wouldn't students be more likely to question both typical and currently fashionable characterizations by period, region, literary movement, ethnic background, and gender? How Southern is Faulkner when he uses Joycean techniques or writes about non-Southern locales? How do the labels "local colorist" and "feminist" help to gain literary reputations for Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin, and how do they freeze those reputations? Is Saul Bellow less of a Jewish writer because he doesn't write in Yiddish? How far would Conrad have gone if he had written only in Polish? Are women authors who focus attention on male protagonists traitors? Reading articles about canon reformation, feminist and post-structuralist theory certainly {16} can sensitize students into asking such questions. But often a direct encounter with a text by a contemporary Indian writer has as much or more of an immediate impact. One of Robert Coles' Harvard Business School students defines this type of impact (in a discussion of William Carlos Williams) in the following way: "Williams' words have become my images and sounds, part of me. You don't do that with theories. . . . You do it with a story, because in a story--oh, like it says in the Bible, the word becomes flesh" (qtd. in Flowers 19).
        Indianness doesn't seem to be a problem when discussing as-told-to autobiographies or tribal ceremonies. Who would question Black Elk's Indian identity or the Navajoness of the Night Way? And yet, as compared to the modern fiction and poetry, texts such as Black Elk Speaks (1932) and Washington Matthews' translation of the Navajo ceremony, like the Kiowa myths in Rainy Mountain and the Laguna and Acoma stories in Storyteller, raise even more fundamental questions about authorship.
        Raymond DeMallie, Sally McCluskey, Michael Castro, H. David Brumble, Clyde Holler, Arnold Krupat, and other scholars have addressed the complexities of the collaborative, bi-cultural authorship of Black Elk Speaks. On the way to becoming printed words in English, Nick Black Elk's spoken words passed from his lips, occasionally joined by the words of friends like Standing Bear, and travelled through his son Ben's ears and mind emerging as spoken English that was quickly transformed into the stenographic notes written by Enid Neihardt. She later transcribed these notes, which her father then reorganized and revised, sometimes barely changing a phrase, other times making paragraph-length deletions and additions. (See Neihardt's Preface xviii-xix. For a sympathetic response to Neihardt's editing, see Castro 83-97. For a negative view, see Krupat, For Those 126-34. For one of the most balanced critiques, see Brumble 6, 30, 36, 45.) As in the cases of Rainy Mountain and Storyteller, Black Elk Speaks can be used to examine the possibilities and limitations of collaborative authorship, translation, and the introduction of unfamiliar perspectives and topics (for instance, Cooper's and Longfellow's Indians, Melville's South Sea Islanders, or even Shakespeare's Moor, Othello).
        Audience and authorship again become crucial but from different perspectives than we saw in the fiction and poetry. How important is it that Black Elk spoke his words in front of Oglala family and friends and Neihardt and his daughters? In the tradition of a Plains coup-telling audience, his friends clearly acted as "witnesses, to validate what [he] has to say" (Brumble 30). Neihardt and his daughters represented a different type of validation--an immediate proof that outside audiences were interested and would soon hear Black Elk's message. Other important questions relate to Black Elk's self image. For instance, in his performance situation, to what degree did he perceive himself as an individual defining himself or {17} as a communal voice of his people (see Bataille 29)? To put these questions in a comparative light, what are the differences between the ways word makers invent, narrate, anticipate, and respond when they are speaking before visible faces instead of writing to invisible readers, or differences between communication as a representative of a group instead of as an individual self? At the very least, these questions could stir students to investigate the authorship strategies of people like Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King, who are recognized as speakers and writers and, especially in the cases of the latter two, known as representatives of their people who reached diversified audiences.
        If Black Elk were asked to define the author of Black Elk Speaks, he might very well respond, "The Great Vision," a gift that was not his invention but was "given to a man too weak to use it" (2). That childhood vision gave meaning to his life, became his essential means of evaluating himself and his people, and created the exigency that compelled him to tell his life story to a non-Lakota writer of English. As logical as this answer seems from a Lakota viewpoint, it is bound to provoke liberating and troubling questions about authorship for literature students. How can an old man remember the details of a nine-year-old boy's vision? How much did he embellish the vision in anticipation of his audience's expectations? Is the dependency on a white writer to communicate the vision beyond Sioux country as a work of literature a final admission of the decline of Plains Indian cultures or a final triumph of those cultures and of the powers of storytelling and the imagination? In comparative contexts, to what degree can questions generated by Black Elk Speaks be applied to Isaiah's prophesies, John's Revelations, or Walt Whitman's visionary flights? And what might the comparisons imply about how different cultures define authorial roles on a spectrum of ideal word makers/senders ranging from the transformer of chaos, inventor of awesome words, and liberator of new perspectives to the ideal as the sensitive receiver, vehicle, conserver, and performer of word gifts? In Whitman's utopia the former would reign; in Black Elk's and the traditional Navajo's, the latter.
         The Navajo Night Way (or Night Chant) remains one of the best-known Native American ceremonies. (Translations, excerpts, videotapes, films, and James C. Faris' recent book make it more accessible than many other ceremonies.⁴) Lasting nine days, its primary, though certainly not its only, function is to attract holiness that will restore a serious physical and/or psychological imbalance that is threatening one or more patients and potentially many other people and even the physical environment.
        Many of the questions about collaborative authorship raised by Love Medicine, The Way to Rainy Mountain, Storyteller, and Black Elk Speaks confront readers of Washington Matthews' monumental translation/description, The Night Chant (1902). Andrew Natona-{18}bah's attribution of the origins of Night Way and other Navajo ceremonial songs to the Holy Beings can be compared to Black Elk's emphasis on his vision (see By This Song I Walk). And more than any other form of Native American literature, the ceremonial texts reveal the full extent of collaborative and communal concepts of authorship. There is divine-human collaboration. The success of the Night Way depends upon a sacred contract. If the ceremony is performed correctly, the Holy Beings must send the holiness that will restore balance, harmony, and beauty. And human collaboration. The success of the Night Way began with ancient word gifts, generations of teacher-apprentice relationships, and complex interdependencies among the diagnostician, chief singer, his assistants (including dancers), the patient(s), the patient(s)' family and friends, and the audience.
        Certainly, an introduction to the origins and continuity of the Night Way can encourage students to ask questions about other great liturgical literatures. Furthermore, in any type of literature course, an acquaintance with the Night Way can undermine simplistic notions of the individual author's fixed text. This is especially true if the instructor introduces the ceremony early in the semester and continues throughout the semester to raise questions about the importance of community sources of literature, of apprenticeships, of collaborations, and of the co-creative forces that make the success of a literary text dependent upon much more than the performance of an individual author.
        By emphasizing concepts of Native American authorship that can provoke questions about the authorship of non-Indian texts, I'm not suggesting that Indian literatures should be taught primarily as warm-ups for discussions of mainstream texts. As I indicated in my introduction, I'm asking teachers and scholars to consider placing Indian literatures at the center of the canon and of theoretical debates. Nor am I suggesting that the only way to make students in survey courses reconsider simplistic notions of authorship is to introduce Indian literatures. Reading post-structuralist criticism, comparing selected mainstream texts, and examining composition, publication, and reception processes can also achieve this goal. I do hope, however, that the few examples I've offered at least hint at the rich diversity of Indian concepts of authorship and the degree to which these concepts often differ from survey students' notions about authors. And I do maintain that this variety and these differences offer teachers numerous opportunities to jar students toward an awareness of questions that they should be asking of every assigned text. In my utopian American literature class, the students would leave appreciating the inclusions of Native American literatures because they would have encountered new forms of literary excellence, new perspectives on their country and their identities, and new questions about the authorship that they could carry into all their future reading experiences.⁵

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NOTES

        ¹For a recent discussion of this dilemma, see Hegeman, especially 268-69, 280.
        ²See "Reconstructing" 437-38; "The Study" B1-B2; and "Survey Courses" 619-24.
         ³For other possible historical and anthropological sources, see Roemer, Approaches 9-11, Appendix A, 154-55. As indicated in the Appendix A headnote, the passages identified are not all sources. I listed many, especially those published after Rainy Mountain, primarily to encourage comparative studies.
         ⁴See Works Cited: Bierhorst 279-351, By This Song I Walk, Faris, Matthews, and Navajo.
         ⁵I delivered earlier versions of parts of this essay during Jan Swearingen's Summer 1989 graduate seminar at the University of Texas at Arlington, at the Conference on the Core and the Canon, Denton, Texas, 28 Oct. 1989, and at the Symposium on Native Writers in American Literature, Orlando, Florida, 30 Mar. 1990. I would like to thank all the respondents, especially Scott Momaday, for their questions and comments. I would also like to thank Professors Larry Abbott and Helen Jaskoski for their revision suggestions.

Adams, Hank. "The Golden Indian." Akwesasne Notes 16:4 (1986): 6-11.

Anderson, Jack. "Lots of Smoke Rises Around This 'Indian.'" Washington Post 16 Feb. 1984: 11.

American Experience. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1989.

Bataille, Gretchen M. Rev. of Lakota Storytelling by Julian Rice. SAIL ser. 2 1:1 (1989): 29-30.

Bierhorst, John, ed. Four Masterworks of American Indian Litera ture. New York: Farrar, 1974.

Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

By This Song I Walk. Words and Place: Native Literature from the American Southwest. Ser. of eight videocassettes. Dir. Larry Evers. New York: Clearwater, 1981.

Carafiol, Peter. "The New Orthodoxy: Ideology and the Institution of American Literary History." American Literature 58 (1987): 626-38.

Castro, Michael. Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1983.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Then Badger Said This. New York: Vantage, 1977.

DeMallie, Raymond. The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984.

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Dorris, Michael. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. New York: Holt, 1987.

Elliott, Emory, et al., eds. American Literature: A Prentice Hall Anthology, 2. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991.

Erdrich, Louise. The Beet Queen. New York: Holt, 1986.

------. Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris: Interview with Kay Bonetti. Audiotape. American Audio Prose Library. 1986.

------. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, 1984.

------. Tracks. New York: Holt, 1988.

------. "Whatever Is Really Yours: An Interview with Louise Erdrich." Joseph Bruchac. Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987. 73-86.

Faris, James C. The Nightway: A History and a History of Documentation of a Navajo Ceremony. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1990.

Flowers, Betty S. "The Moral Imagination." ADE Bulletin 95 (1990): 18-20.

Hegeman, Susan. "Native American 'Texts' and the Problem of Authenticity." American Quarterly 41 (1989): 265-283.

Hobson, Geary, ed. The Remembered Earth. 1979. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1981.

Holler, Clyde. "Lakota Religion and Tragedy: The Theology of Black Elk Speaks." Journal of the Academy of Religion 52(1984): 19-45.

Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkeley, U of California P, 1985.

------. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Lauter, Paul, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2 vols. Lexington: Heath, 1990.

Lincoln, Kenneth. "Tai-me to Rainy Mountain: The Makings of American Indian Literature." American Indian Quarterly 10 (1986): 101-17.

Matthews, Washington. The Night Chant, a Navaho Ceremony. 1902. New York: AMS, 1978.

McCluskey, Sally. "Black Elk Speaks, and So Does John G. Neihardt." Western Literature 6 (1972): 231-42.

McQuade, Donald, et al., eds. The Harper American Literature, 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1987.

Momaday, N. Scott. Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Ed. Charles L. Woodward. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.

------. The Journey of Tai-me. Santa Barbara: privately printed, 1967.

------. "Kiowa Legends from The Journey of Tai-me." Sun Tracks 3:1 (1976): 6-9.

------. "The Man Made of Words." 1970. Hobson 162-73.

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------. The Names: A Memoir. 1976. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987.

------. "Response" [to Kenneth M. Roemer. "Reconstructive Encounters."] Symposium on Native Writers in American Literature. Orlando, 30 Mar. 1990.

------. The Way to Rainy Mountain. 1969. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1976.

Mooney, James. Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians. 1898. Introd. John C. Ewers. Washington: Smithsonian, 1979.

Navajo: The Fight for Survival. 16 mm film. BBC/Time-Life, 1972.

Neihardt, John G., ed. Black Elk Speaks: Being a Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as Told through John G. Neihardt. 1932. Introd. Vine Deloria, Jr. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979.

Roemer, Kenneth M., ed. Approaches to Teaching Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain. New York: MLA, 1988.

------. "Reconstructing the American Canon ([Part]2)." The Rising Generation (Tokyo) 135:9 (1989): 436-40.

------. "The Study of American Indian Literature Can Illuminate the Classics in New Ways." The Chronicle of Higher Education 12 July 1989: B1-B2.

------. "Survey Courses, Indian Literature, and The Way to Rainy Mountain." College English 37 (1976): 619-24.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. "American Indian Literatures: Introduction and Bibliography." American Studies International 24:2 (1986): 2-52.

------. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: MLA, 1990.

Sanders, Scott R. Rev. of Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. SAIL 9.1 (1985): 6-11.

Schubnell, Matthias. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1985.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Seaver-Viking, 1977.

------. Storyteller. New York: Seaver, 1981.

Swann, Brian, and Arnold Krupat, eds. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

Vitanza, Victor J. "Three 'Counter'-Theses; or, A Critical In[ter] vention into Composition Theories and (Pedagogies)." Contending With Words. Ed. Patricia Hakin and John Schilb. New York: MLA, forthcoming. Page references are to Vitanza's manuscript.

Wiget, Andrew. "Identity and Direction: Reflections on the ASAIL Notes Survey." ASAIL Notes 3:1 (1986):4.

Wong, Hertha D. "Contemporary Native American Autobiography: N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 12:3 (1988): 15-31.

------. "Orality and Photography as Autobiographical Modes in Silko's Storyteller." ALA Conference on American Literature. San Diego, 2 June 1990.

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        I am proposing a composition course based entirely on American Indian autobiography. Although designed as an upper-level elective course for English majors, it may be modified for basic composition or for Advanced Placement English. Before I describe the curriculum, however, let me answer the obvious question: Why American Indian autobiography?
        First, I'm interested in American Indian autobiography and want to share that interest with my students. Second, I wish to expand the canon. As critics point out, the voices of American Indian writers too often go unheard (Ramsey, Ruoff, Wiget). Third, I'd like to add my voice to those who have already suggested ways to use native autobiography in composition classes (Anderson, Hoehner, Lundquist, Roemer). Fourth, I believe the course has wide appeal. It will likely pique interest among students curious about Native peoples. It may also attract female students by including works of American Indian women; and I hope it draws minority students, especially Native Americans, who have few classes that acknowledge their ethnic experience. Finally, transcending gender and race, a composition course based on autobiography should appeal to young adults, so many of whom are struggling to find themselves. Indeed, high school and college are rites of passage, quests for self-identity. American Indian autobiography should be germane to these students because it typically records the experiences of individuals caught "between two cultures," struggling to survive in an alien world while clinging to the past. Although not to the same degree, many white students are themselves caught between cultures, adjusting to school, preparing for the world that awaits after graduation.
        More than appealing to students, there are strong curricular reasons for teaching a composition course based on autobiography. It provides a unified, coherent thematic focus. Breaking away from the traditional modes-of-discourse approach, which frequently meanders through unconnected assignments, this course locates students in a specific place and maps out their journey. Further, the curriculum is grounded in established discourse theory. Students will work through a series of assignments spiraling them outward from self-expression to critical analysis (Moffett); and they'll write for diverse audiences: themselves, each other, and me (Britton).
        I plan for students to write five 1500 to 2000 word essays, totaling about 10,000 words for the semester. They will also keep a journal in which they record responses not only to the readings but also to their composing processes. In effect, the journal will be a constant, driving our class discussions while promoting individual metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness.
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        I'll begin the class by asking everyone to compose an autobiography. No instructions. No models. They'll just write autobiography, in vacuo, in any way they please. They may draft their entire life story from day one to the present, or they may freewrite about their summer vacation. Next, we'll read and discuss their papers to arrive at some common understanding of what an autobiography is. To supplement our discussion, we'll read selections from Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat's I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. We'll continue our talk in light of these essays, modifying definitions, examining assumptions about content and form. My rationale for moving from practice to theory is to let students solve the autobiographical puzzle themselves, working inductively from known to unknown, extending their knowledge in the process. Moreover, by reading the autobiographies of Jim Barnes, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, and Joy Harjo, I hope students will come to appreciate the difficulties many Native Americans have bridging cultures, as well as the enduring importance of tribal traditions. Hence my two-fold purpose is to raise consciousness about autobiography and contemporary American Indian life. Students will then revise the first version of their autobiography, possibly experimenting with sequence and multiple forms, developing (if applicable) the kinds of personal and cultural conflicts that epitomize the essays in I Tell You Now.
        The second assignment asks students to recreate the type of American Indian autobiography most often published during the 19th and early 20th centuries: the as-told-to autobiography. This time, instead of jumping into the writing task, I'll provide direct instruction. We'll read Ruth Underhill's Papago Woman to acquire familiarity with the genre, and I'll talk about how as-told-to's are typically produced. As H. David Brumble III explains: "Ethnologist encourages informant to relate life history, asking questions along the way to guide informant and to ensure adequate detail; ethnologist then edits this great bundle of material (now usually in translation) into something like a chronological order, cutting repetitions and making other changes necessary to transform a collection of transcripts of individual performances into a single, more or less continuous narrative" (119-20). Because someone will doubtless ask how this is different from a biography, I'll stress that an as-told-to autobiography is presented as a first-person narrative. As Arnold Krupat says, the claim is that "the white man is silent while the Indian speaks for himself" (47).
        Once students understand the task, they'll write an as-told-to autobiography of one of their classmates, following the procedure described above. My main role will be to pair them up. Adhering to the principle of bicultural composition, I'll encourage whites to work with Native Americans or other minority students or, if it's more feasible, males to work with females. First, they'll need to prepare a questionnaire, as any ethnologist would. They may formulate their {30} questions based on those that drive Underhill's study, or we might brainstorm a list of questions in class. What I would prefer, however, is that each student design his or her own questionnaire based solely on whatever he or she perceives as the most productive, interesting line of inquiry. Second, they'll conduct interviews with their informant, recording responses, if possible on a tape recorder or even on videotape. These interviews, to be done in class or at home, may include one long session or several short ones. Third, they'll transcribe and compile all their materials and make final decisions about how best to present their informant's life.
        All through this process they should keep detailed field notes on why they asked specific questions, how they conducted their interviews, how they responded to being interviewed, what problems they encountered in assembling their material, why they decided to present the autobiography in a particular manner, and whether or not they captured the essence of their subject--whether or not they wrote a "true" autobiography. Ultimately, they'll turn in not only the final draft of the as-told-to autobiography but all their working papers and their journal. They will also present a copy of the autobiography to their informant.
        Although Brumble and Krupat criticize the inferior methodology of the as-told-to autobiography, I believe the approach is nonetheless valuable because it will offer students an excellent opportunity to get inside composing processes, to become acutely aware of rhetorical situations, problems, and responsibilities. More than requiring knowledge of the genre, the assignment raises dozens of questions that each writer must answer if he or she is to complete the project successfully. From the start, these amateur ethnologists will face rhetorical problems. Soliciting the narrative, they must examine their purpose--to inform? to delight? to persuade? Organizing materials, they must consider their obligations both to their informant and their audience. Whereas Brumble says the ethnologist does not "impose a pattern, other than chronological, upon the material" (120), Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands claim the recorder/editor usually structures the materials, "presenting them in a stylistically pleasing manner" (12). Whom do students believe? If they edit irrelevant details or fill in background context or change order for dramatic effect, do they violate their informant's rights? Are they falsifying data? Who or what ultimately determines content and structure? The informant's exact responses (no matter how confusing or boring) or the audience's expectations and needs? And what about voice? How do they make the autobiography sound like the informant? Is it a matter of simply transcribing responses verbatim, or is art involved? What if the informant stutters or babbles or uses profanity? And where do they stand in relation to their material? Do they present the autobiography solely as the informant's story, or do they place themselves in it? Should they, like Underhill, write an {31} introduction explaining their roles, or should they remain anonymous and mute?
        In the past I've explained the complexities of the communication triangle and the aims of discourse, but always it seemed in isolation, as part of an assignment but somehow apart from it. I believe the as-told-to autobiography will foreground these issues, integrate and contextualize them within the assignment, enabling students to learn firsthand the strategies that expert writers use to define and solve rhetorical problems (Flower and Hayes). Moreover, students should move beyond self-expression or writing only for a grade. They'll write for each other, seriously and intimately, about the most important thing in their lives--themselves. This is one time when peer pressure may be a positive motivator.
        The third assignment, a logical extension of the previous ones, includes two parts. First, students will compare their own autobiography to their as-told-to (not the one they wrote, but the one written of their life). For background, we'll read Black Elk Speaks and critical commentaries by Sally McClusky, Michael Castro, and Raymond DeMallie, focusing mainly on Neihardt's contribution to the text and the differences between his and Black Elk's versions. The students will then scrutinize the two versions of their autobiography, noting all similarities and differences. It may be a good idea to spend a class period discussing criteria, establishing the critical vocabulary necessary for such a comparison, although by now everyone should be familiar with rhetorical terms. Second, students will analyze how and why the two versions differ. They'll peruse their partner's field notes to search for reasons why discrepancies appear, and they'll interview their partners face-to-face to ask why the story about Uncle Casey and the pickled herring was left out, or how come "expletive deleted" is used instead of "bullshit." By comparing both versions and by analyzing both authors' intentions, students should gain valuable insights into the autobiographical process and deepen their understanding of how writers construct meaning. In a sense, the assignment is the equivalent of Black Elk's response to John G. Neihardt, not just setting the record straight, but better understanding Neihardt's motives.
        My hidden curriculum will be to make students aware of the assumptions they brought to their as-told-to's and by transference to see how the cultural baggage Underhill and Niehardt carried to the reservation affected their texts and changed Maria Chona's and Black Elk's stories. Kathleen Sands says autobiography "offers us an insightful, complete, and varied means of entrance into the private and public worlds of the American Indian" (55). And that may be true. Arnold Krupat, however, argues that as-told-to autobiographies were often used as ploys to justify Western imperialism, support cultural evolution, and advance academic careers. If reading the essays in I Tell You Now can raise consciousness about contemporary American Indian life, then reading, writing, comparing, and {32} analyzing as-told-to autobiographies should expose hidden bias and prejudice, not only Underhill's and Neihardt's but the students' as well.
        Essay #4 shifts from ethnographic to literary autobiography. Instead of writing about their own or their classmate's experience, students will now write a critical essay on a published autobiography, N. Scott Momaday's memoir The Names. The easiest way to handle the instruction would be to distribute handouts on literary interpretation and let everyone fend for himself, but that would be an invitation to chaos. For as long as I've been teaching composition, I'm always surprised by how difficult students find the transition to writing about literature. To avoid losing them at this stage of the semester, my approach will be manifold.
        First, students may write a standard critical essay, focusing on setting, character, imagery, theme--the basic elements of literature. A similar approach would be to examine the work in light of Bataille and Sands' definition of a literary autobiography. Students may conduct small-group workshops on how well Momaday's memoir illustrates each of the characteristics Bataille and Sands enumerate: "dialogue, exploration of inner emotions and responses to events, a first-person omniscient point of view, latitude in handling time and sequence of events and an awareness of audience" and "informal, conversational language for stylistic effect" (11). Considering the last assignment, however, and hoping to bridge writing tasks, I'll encourage students to try a rhetorical analysis of The Names, exploring writer, reader, subject transactions. Also, with the personal writing focus of the first three assignments, I may urge them to analyze some element of The Names (perhaps landscape) in relation to their own autobiography, comparing and contrasting Momaday's use to theirs. Frankly, I like this approach best because it personalizes literature; N. Scott Momaday becomes a fellow autobiographer, not a great literary bear.
        I'll also invite broader-based approaches that reflect personal or academic interests and involve additional reading or library research. Since The Names is a recent addition to a long list of American Indian autobiographies, students may wish to compare it to an earlier one, such as Charles A. Eastman's Indian Boyhood, or they may wish to trace a progression in 20th century American Indian autobiography. David Brumble claims that Momaday uses "preliterate" autobiographical traditions in The Names and The Way to Rainy Mountain (165-80). Students may explore the use of these traditions in the essays in I Tell You Now or in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller. On the issue of gender, I'd encourage students to follow Bataille and Sands' lead by analyzing gender differences between Momaday's The Names and Silko's Storyteller, or by examining the influence of gender in their own autobiographies. Clearly, at this point in the semester I hope students will pursue individual interests and work more-or-less independent of me. Instead of their instruc-{33}tor, I'll become an adviser; we could even cancel classes for a week of independent research and conferences.
        For the final assignment, we'll look at autobiographical fiction, either D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded or Momaday's House Made of Dawn, both of which draw heavily on personal experience and tribal tradition. We'll focus on (1) how the authors employ autobiographical techniques, and (2) how they transform life experiences into fiction. For those students who enjoy rhetorical or technical analysis, the first topic would be a natural, a chance to hone their critical skills in a new genre. For those intrigued by the view that autobiography, regardless of whether it's ethnographic or literary, is never a mere record of fact but is always an artifact--an imaginative, artistic creation--the second topic should prove fruitful. How do McNickle and Momaday turn actual events into fiction? If both autobiography and novel are artifacts, what distinguishes them? How does House Made of Dawn differ from The Names? What do we make of the "stories" that comprise The Names? A different approach would be to have the students write a short story based on their initial autobiography and then analyze the differences between them. They may not only gain insight into the two genres but also come to realize, in Momaday's phrase, that their lives are "made of words." That would be an exciting way to finish the class and bring it full circle.
        American Indian autobiography and written composition make a good match, and I believe my proposed course has much to offer. At the level of writer, it will give students interesting, varied assignments and an emic perspective of composing processes. At the level of individual, it will provide an opportunity for personal growth, a school-sponsored way for students to explore who and what they are. Momaday says: "The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined" (103); sadly, today many students would rather party than take the time to imagine, or else they imagine themselves behind the wheel of a Porsche. Here is an invitation to pull off the road for a while to discover where they're going. At the level of human being, the course will attempt to topple barriers between Indians and whites. If nothing else, it will introduce students to works by American Indian writers, and if I can teach my hidden curriculum it should break down stereotypes and nurture a better understanding of native cultures. It should also show white students that Native Americans are not "other," that they have the same hopes, fears, and doubts as everyone else.
        In a recent article entitled "Censorship and Spiritual Education," James Moffett decries the dangers of exclusive literacy. Asserting that "youngsters need to experience all kinds of discourse and all kinds of voices and viewpoints and styles," he implores us "to encompass all heritages, cross cultures, raise consciousness enough to peer over the social perimeters that act as parameters of knowledge" (84). For too long the academy has imposed de facto censor-{34}ship on minority literatures, excluding them from the canon, our literary heritage, and our culture. A composition course based on American Indian autobiography will not eliminate institutional censorship, nor will it necessarily increase spirituality, but it will be a move toward higher ground.

Anderson, Lauri. "The Way to Rainy Mountain in Freshman Composition Courses." Approaches to Teaching Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain. Ed. Kenneth M. Roemer. New York: MLA, 1988. 98-102.

Bataille, Gretchen M., and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984.

Britton, James, et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). London: MacMillan Education, 1975.

Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Castro, Michael. Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1983.

DeMallie, Raymond. The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984.

Eastman, Charles A. Indian Boyhood. 1902. New York: Dover, 1971.

Flower, Linda S., and John R. Hayes. "The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem." College Composition and Communication 31 (1980): 21-32.

Hoener, David. "From Israel to Oklahoma: The Way to Rainy Mountain, Composition, and Cross-Cultural Awareness." Approaches to Teaching Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain. Ed. Kenneth M. Roemer. New York: MLA, 1988. 103-09.

Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After: A Study of American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

Lundquist, Suzanne Evertsen. "College Composition: An Experience in Ethnographic Thinking." Approaches to Teaching Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain. Ed. Kenneth M. Roemer. New York: MLA, 1988. 110-15.

McClusky, Sally. "Black Elk Speaks: And So Does John Neihardt." Western American Literature 6 (1972): 231-42.

McNickle, D'Arcy. The Surrounded. 1936. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1978.

Moffett, James. "Censorship and Spiritual Education." English Education 21 (1989): 70-87.

------. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton, 1968.

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Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper, 1968.

------. "The Man Made of Words." Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations. Ed. Abraham Chapman. New York: NAL, 1975. 96-110.

------. The Names: A Memoir. New York: Harper, 1976.

------. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: U of New Mex ico P, 1969.

Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. 1932. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979.

Ramsey, Jarold. "American Indian Literatures and American Litera ture: An Overview." ADE Bulletin 75 (1983): 35-38.

Roemer, Kenneth M. "Inventive Modeling: Rainy Mountain's Way to Composition." College English 46 (1984): 767-82.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. "Teaching American Indian Authors, 1772-1968." ADE Bulletin 75 (1983): 39-42.

Sands, Kathleen Mullen. "American Indian Autobiography." Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: MLA, 1983. 55-65.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Seaver, 1981.

Swann, Brian, and Arnold Krupat, eds. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

Underhill, Ruth M. Papago Woman. 1936. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland, 1985.

Wiget, Andrew. "Sending a Voice: The Emergence of Contemporary Native American Poetry." College English 46 (1984): 598-609.

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        I had accepted an invitation to be Scholar in Residence for the Arizona Humanities Council at the largest Indian high school in the U.S.--on the Navajo Reservation. Fourteen hundred students, 95 percent Navajo, 3 percent Hopi, 2 percent Ute, Havasupai, Crow, Anglo. My charge was to infuse the humanities into the curriculum, with special emphasis on Navajo (and Hopi) culture. As part of my fulfillment of that charge, I relied on the poetry being written by young Indians now and in the last 20 to 25 years. The voice of beauty, pain, and power raised in this poetry is astonishing, is, as has been said, the voice of the land itself. During the year five Indian poets came to the school to reach and teach, and a poem by an American Indian was published each Friday in the school bulletin, which was read second hour in all classes. The administration was extremely sensitive about which poems appeared in the bulletin--I had to clear my choice each week with the principal, a Navajo, supportive of the project but not popular with his faculty, and fearful of being accused of being a racist if the Friday poems were too hard-hitting. The students were fed a steady diet of Anglo standards--Beowulf, Shakespeare, Wordsworth--and most had little sense of their own literature or history.
        Second semester, in order to make it possible to include a wider range of poems in the Friday bulletin, I began to attend the weekly chairpersons' meeting--to read and discuss with them the poem that was to appear that Friday. This was a group of twenty or so persons, mixed male/female, Anglo/Navajo/Hopi. At my third or fourth session with them, I chose to work with Jimmie Durham's poem, "Columbus Day." It is an extremely angry poem, but he ends, as he must, in beauty.

                                            Columbus Day

                 In school I was taught the names
                 Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro and
                 A dozen other filthy murderers.

[At this point the white chair of the physical education department, a fundamentalist, married to a Navajo, jumped up and down in his chair and blurted out, "I protest, I protest." I read over the top of his protest.]

                 A bloodline all the way to General Miles,
                 Daniel Boone and General Eisenhower.

                 No one mentioned the names
                 Of even a few of the victims.
                 But don't you remember Chaske, whose spine
                 Was crushed so quickly by Mr. Pizzaro's boot?
                 What words did he cry into the dust?
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                 What was the familiar name
                 Of that young girl who danced so gracefully
                 That everyone in the village sang with her--
                 Before Cortez' sword hacked off her arms
                 As she protested the burning of her sweetheart?

                 That young man's name was Many Deeds,
                 And he had been a leader of a band of fighters
                 Called the Redstick Hummingbirds, who slowed
                 The march of Cortez' army with only a few
                 Spears and stones which now lay still
                 In the mountains and remember.

                 Greenrock Woman was the name
                 Of that old lady who walked right up
                 And spat in Columbus' face. We
                 Must remember that, and remember
                 Laughing Otter the Taino, who tried to stop
                 Columbus and who was taken away as a slave.
                 We never saw him again.

                 In school I learned of heroic discoveries
                 Made by liars and crooks. The courage
                 Of millions of sweet and true people
                 Was not commemorated.

                 Let us then declare a holiday
                 For ourselves, and make a parade that begins
                 With Columbus' victims and continues
                 Even to our grandchildren who will be named
                 In their honor.
                 Because isn't it true that even the summer
                 Grass here in this land whispers those names?
                 And every creek has accepted the responsibility
                 Of singing those names? And nothing can stopt
                 The wind from howling those names around
                 The corners of the school.

                 Why else would the birds sing
                 So much sweeter here than in other lands?

        At the close of the reading the physical education chair began to explain his protest. He thought the poems presented things from the past that were too negative and that were best forgotten, that what we needed to do for our students was give them positive images and experiences, that they already had enough negatives in their lives. A short discussion occurred about whether or not the poem was negative and what the students needed from us as educators. One of the Navajo chairs said--"We've got three students here to make a presentation; why not ask them what they think?" We did, and one, a young woman, a junior, spoke for all three. "Of course there are things in our history as Indian people that are dark and very painful. {38} There are parts of our history that are difficult to know and to accept. But we students can endure our own history, we need to know it, because it's the truth. And that's our main need from you, our teachers--we need to hear the truth, no matter how hard that is."
        That ended the discussion. She spoke so well, so cleanly, so to the point. "Columbus Day" was in the bulletin on Friday. I come back to this incident often in my mind. It has a classical structure to it--a young Navajo woman, sixteen years old, instructing twenty department chairs plus the principal plus the humanities scholar on the preeminence of the truth of their history--their hunger and need for that in order to know what they are (for their identity and self-esteem)--and knowing that Jimmie Durham, Cherokee, gives them some information on the so-called discovery of America that they haven't found (and probably won't find) in history textbooks or at Columbus Day celebrations.
        How accurate is Jimmie Durham? What are his sources of information? Why isn't this viewpoint more widely known and taught? And if Navajo kids in Arizona need to know the truth of their history, Anglo kids in Bellingham or Chillicothe need it just as much for their identity as well, and so the ongoing holocaust perpetrated against all forms of life on this planet, that has been accelerating for centuries, may be slowed and redirected rather than intensified.
        At an earlier meeting with the English Department to discuss including more Native American literature in the curriculum, there were teachers who said openly that to bring in the Native literature was an attempt to take us all back to the cave. "We all started in caves!" was the exact comment. And when asked about the environmental wisdom contained in that literature, we were told by this teacher: "We don't need it. When we ruin this planet, we'll get into our spaceships and go to another, and when we ruin that one, we'll go to another, and when we ruin that one, we'll go to another, and another, and another, and another. That's what technology is for." This person, whose father was reported to be a teacher of Shakespeare at a Canadian university, not only believed this, he taught it to young Navajos to prepare them for entry into the white world. How many like him come through our existing schools to become teachers?
        The young woman who stood by her need for the truth of her history stays with me. I retell her story frequently. After one such retelling back in Montana I realized that I didn't know the meaning of that simple word, true. This drove me to Webster's, where I found true--akin to Greek treu: I.E., base, derew--a tree (see tree), basic sense, "firm as a tree." Here it was--an abstract word, true, leading straight back to a concrete word, tree, and to a specific attribute of tree--firmness. Like the humus in human: rootedness. No one had ever suggested in my hearing that the truth had anything to do with trees. I thought of the clearcuts in Montana, of the bodies {39} of those trees sunk in the harbors of Japan, of the 200 acres of virgin oak my great-great grandfather had burnt in Ohio to make his farm; I thought of the barren, rocky slopes of Greece denuded to build the Athenian fleets; I thought of the rain forest, cut and burnt to raise beef for "Happy Meals"; I thought of Gary Snyder's Wasco Indian logger who sold his chain saw, let his hair grow long, and apprenticed himself to a medicine man because he couldn't stand to hear the trees scream as he cut into them. I thought of the truth of trees: Tree--akin to Gothic triu; I.E., base, derew, a tree, see dryad. Dryad: Greek, dryas, drys, an oak, tree, (