{i}
SAIL
Studies in American Indian
Literatures
Series 2
Volume 9, Number
2
Summer 1997
CONTENTS
Pragmatism and American Indian Thought
Sidner Larson
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1
Walking with Jim Northrup and Sharing His "Rez"ervations
Roseanne Hoefel
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.
11
Shaman or Showman
Mace DeLorme
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22
Stories, Humor, and Survival in Jim Northrup's Walking
theRez Road
Chris LaLonde
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23>
Irony and the "Balance of Nature on the Ridges" in
Mathews's Talking to the
Moon
Lee Schweninger
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41
Fishing at Sandy Point
Tiffany Midge
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57
Tribute to Mary TallMountain
Jeane Breinig
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59
Reflections on Mary TallMountain's Life and Writing: Facing
Mirrors
Gabrielle Welford
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61
The Politics of Point of View: Representing History in Mourning
Dove's Cogewea and
D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
Robert Holton
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69
FORUM
From the Editors
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81
Calls for Submissions
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82
{ii}
REVIEWS
Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific
Fact. Vine Deloria,
Jr.
Joanne Marie Barker
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.
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.
84
The Legacy of D'Arcy McNickle: Writer, Historian, Activist.
Ed. John Lloyd Purdy
Andrew McClure
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87
The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Ed. T. Lindsay Baker
and Julie P. Baker
MariJo Moore
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92
Completing the Circle. Virginia Driving Hawk
Sneve
James Treat
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.
.
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94
Bone Game. Louis Owens
Julie LaMay Abner
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.
.
.
96
CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . 98
1997 ASAIL
Patrons:
Sherman Alexie
Karl Kroeber
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
Western Washington University
University of Richmond
and others who wish to remain anonymous
1997
Sponsors:
Harald Gaski
Arnold Krupat
James L. Thorson
and others who wish to remain anonymous
{1}
Pragmatism and American Indian Thought
Sidner Larson
In his book Tribal Secrets:
Vine Deloria, Jr., John Joseph Mathews, and the Recovery
of American Indian Intellectual Traditions, Robert Warrior describes Vine Deloria as
being
committed to pragmatic politics and involved in "a search, at once pragmatic and idealistic,
for answers to the problems of Native communities and the world as a whole" (61-62).
In this sense, pragmatism might be
thought of as comparable to Plains Indian
philosophies that attempt to create a balance between engaging the world as it is encountered
and honoring a world of inherited traditions. This sense of balance is perhaps particularly
valuable to current problems facing local and world communities.
In 1903 John Dewey, chair of the
Department of Philosophy of the University of
Chicago, published an extended discussion of what he had named "instrumental logic," more
popularly known as pragmatism. Dewey insisted on a precise description of the interaction
between the mind and experience, asserting that philosophy was intimately tied to everyday
life and that the philosopher had an obligation to society to use his/her training and ability to
help other people. This was very different from the western tradition, within which, from
Plato to Hegel, intellectual operations of the mind were thought to reflect some sort of ideal
principles of a perfect mind or soul. Dewey's ideas referred to concrete situations in the
present environment and dismissed any attempt to establish a correspondence with absolute
values (Dewey 8).
This basic definition of pragmatism
corresponds in recognizable ways to fundamental
American Indian notions of family, community, spirituality, and relationship to environment.
Such beliefs may be found in texts such as Black Elk Speaks, where sufficient
Lakota oral
tradition was translated into {2} print to give a glimpse
of sophisticated Plains Indian history,
religion, and ceremony. Although reflective of but one of many Indian cultures, Black Elk
Speaks is especially useful in comparative discussion because of the fact it is one of the
better
known Indian stories in America.
Speaking of his visions near the end
of his life, Black Elk said: "I recall the great vision
you sent me . . . hear me that [my people] may once more go back into the sacred hoop and
find the good red road, the shielding tree" (33). Black Elk envisioned two intersecting
realities, the spiritual world, which he called the Red Road, and the earthly world, which he
called the Black Road, roads that come together at the heart of the world through a
flowering tree.
Lakota tradition is rich in content
articulated in complex images, yet it remains very
functional in three important ways. First, the medicine pipe forms the core of a kinship
system based on the circle, a unified form promoting balance among all things. All that the
Lakota see is in the shape of a hoop, organized into finite divisions such as fourths; for
example, four colors, four seasons, four times of day. Additional meanings are organized
within these divisions, creating an order that locates the Indian world within a preexisting
harmony. For example, the color yellow is associated with the east, where day begins with
the yellow sunrise; other stories of beginning might feature an animal transformer, such as a
light-colored horse, as metaphor for a reminder, lesson, or warning.
Second, the natural world is made
sacred by transformations. One important role of
transformers has to do with tempering excess, as illustrated by the fact that being "made
sacred" often means providing for the black road of material life to be balanced by the red
road of spiritual life. In Black Elk's vision such transformation is represented by
"interconnected, renewing life forms in overlapping images, from grandfathers who turn into
horses that turn into elk, buffalo, and eagle" (Lincoln 89). These images often take the form
of helpers, who counsel temperance or warn of danger.
Third, the Lakota social world derives
from the natural world. Place-names such as Pine
Ridge describe the physical makeup of a particular location; time is pictured seasonally by
moons, for example, Moon When the Red Cherries Are Ripe (July) and Moon of the
Popping Trees (December); and stories are told in a language of natural signs, as in Black
Elk Speaks, when Fire Thunder says of the 1867 Wagon Box Fight, "they shot so fast it
[sounded] like tearing a blanket" (14). Utilizing the natural world for sources of meaning ties
earthly and human worlds together by association. The details contained within Black Elk's
story combine to form a powerful narrative, made so by its reflection of complex tribal
metaphysics that may prove helpful to serious problems faced by many societies today.
An example of such metaphysics that
is emblematic of the majority of {3} American
Indian societies is the Iroquois idea of community. Scott L. Pratt has analyzed the early
writings of Cadwallader Colden, who asserts that Iroquois society presented human beings as
fundamentally part of a community rather than as naturally separate beings:
"Individuals" are defined by their place in the community and are judged by their characters as constructive or destructive in the context of the community. In Colden's view the quality of individuals among the Iroquois is a matter of the esteem in which they are held by others in the community for their actions in support of the community itself. (28)
Colden's view differed
significantly from that of other early European thinkers regarding
the relationship of individuals to communities. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and
John Locke incorporated observations about Native Americans to establish the idea that
human persons in the state of nature are fundamentally self-centered.
Pratt's discovery of this particular
conflict is part of his larger suggestion that American
Indians may have influenced American philosophy, such as in the case of pragmatism. In
addition, the study helps illustrate ways academicians are increasingly considering American
Indian intellectual history a valuable resource.
It seems practical that the mystery and
destiny unique to this continent are best
understood through its oldest inhabitants, the Indians. It also follows that familiarity with
their outlooks, as well as with history and science written about them, is necessary to any
attempt to understand the meaning and character of this destiny. Fortunately, there are
well-developed beliefs, such as those of the Lakota and Iroquois, that can help broaden
perspectives toward the natural world and human worldviews, especially where human
worldviews have become dangerously unbalanced.
In the context of lack of balance,
consider for a moment the largely unresolved
genocide perpetrated by Europeans against indigenous peoples of the Americas. Perhaps it is
possible to perpetrate such destruction without consequences, but perhaps it is not. Creation
stories of American Indians suggest inappropriate behavior such as greed-based violence
results in the most dire consequences. From the western plains tribe known as the Gros
Ventre comes this admonition against such improper conduct.
An unknown person, perhaps Nix'ant, became very unhappy with the way people were living. He kicked the ground and water came out and covered the earth. All were drowned but The Crow who flew above, and Nix'ant, who floated on buffalo chips with the chief pipe. Crow and Nix'ant became tired of the water, so Nix'ant unwrapped the pipe, which contained copies of all animals. He sent the Large Loon and {4} the Small Loon to dive for mud, but they were unable to bring any to the surface. Then he sent Turtle, who brought up a little earth inside its feet. From this Nix'ant made land. From tears he made water, from the new land he fashioned more people and animals.
[Nix'ant] told the people if they were good there would be no more water and no more fire. (Before the water rose the world had been burned; this now is the third life.) Then he showed them the rainbow, and told them it was the sign that the earth will not be covered with water again, it means the rain has gone by. He also said there will be another world after this one. (Kroeber 59-61)
Nix'ant became angry with the early people because they "did not know how to do anything" and they "lived like animals," according to the stories contained in Regina Flannery's The Gros Ventres of Montana. From the culture of the eastern Iroquois comes a similar story that further clarifies problematic behavior.
An intermediary figure in the form of a Sky-Woman arrives in a place to make a dwelling for those who need it. Animals help her by diving for earth, or oeh-da, then bear her down to it on their wings. She is called Ata-en-sic, and is pregnant.
The oeh-da grew rapidly and had become an island when Ata-en-sic, hearing voices under her heart, one soft and soothing, the other loud and contentious, knew that her mission to people the island was nearing.
To her solitude two lives were coming, one peaceful and patient, the other restless and vicious. The latter, discovering light under the mother's arm, thrust himself through, to contentions and strife, the right born entered life for freedom and peace.
Foreknowing their powers, each claimed domination and a struggle between them began, Hah-gweh-di-yu claiming the right to beautify the island, while Hah-gweh-da-et-gah determined to destroy. Each went his way, and where peace had reigned discord and strife prevailed. (Converse 32-34)
In the Gros Ventre story,
generally bad behavior is said to have caused the destruction
of the world, and the people are admonished not to repeat their mistakes. In the Iroquois
story the definition of bad behavior is spelled out as being a devaluation of life: "for any
slight offense a man or a woman was killed by his enemy. . . . At night none dared to leave
their doorways lest they be struck down by an enemy's club" (Parker 17).
According to their stories, the
Iroquois
were eventually able to recover equilibrium
when the good brother was able to defeat the bad brother by singing him a song of peace, but
overcoming self-interest and violence in {5} order to
restore harmony was an extremely
difficult thing to do.
These mythic stories are made
relevant by parallels in modern times. For example, Philip
Gourevitch, in a recent discussion of selfish and violent behavior in Rwanda, Africa,
compares Rwanda's social, political, and economic structures to criminal syndicates.
Gourevitch describes how, from a workable tribal society prior to German intervention in
1897, Rwanda's postcolonial civil bureaucracy became efficiently organized into pyramids of
patron-client relationships, as in what has come to be known as the mafia. This
organizational pattern was so rigidly structured that when its chief patron was assassinated,
there was nobody else to assume leadership, and Rwandans insanely murdered what is
thought to be nearly a million fellow-countrymen.
This genocide happened, Gourevitch
concludes, because, "far from being part of the
failed state syndrome that appears to plague some parts of Africa, Rwanda was too
successful as a state" (87). It is ironic that a society can actually be too successful; it is tragic
that Rwandan transformation from a reciprocal and distributive people to worshippers of
private ownership and consumption has resulted in mass murder.
A primary vehicle for the
transformation of reciprocal peoples into worshippers of
private ownership and consumption is a corresponding violent transformation of reality by
language. One outcome of this kind of fundamental disrespect for language is explained by a
Rwandan lawyer, who said, "He loved the Cartesian, Napoleonic legal system, on which
Rwanda's is modeled, but he said that it didn't correspond to Rwandan reality" (93). The
Rwandan system is "petty," the lawyer explained, full of chronic liars who try to tell everyone
what they imagine they want to hear in order to maintain their own game and get what they
are after.
There are disturbing similarities
between the situations of Rwandans and other
contemporary societies. For example, America lives with chronic misinformation generated
by the advertising of rapacious capitalism, and, most unfortunately, by the stories of its own
leaders. Although there is no mistaking misuse of the power of words when businessmen and
other leaders lie openly to get what they are after, it is encouraging to know that such power
can also be used for good.
A pragmatic approach to this duality
suggests engaging the world as it is found today,
on a level equal with that of the world of inherited presumptions. To do so, we must also
disengage from the mystifications, creeds, and dogmas that have blinded us to the full
potential of the present moment in its unfolding and infinite possibilities.
A striking example of disengaging
from mystification is found in a recent dialogue
between a formerly high-ranking representative of Soviet Russia and an American journalist.
When the former head of the Russian {6} K.G.B. was
asked if he felt Russia should repent
for past injustices, he replied, "If there has to be repentance, then let everyone repent. . . .
You should repent for what you've done to the Indians. I haven't heard that from you. If you
repent, we will, too" (Remnick 43). In this instance, face-to-face communication penetrated
decades of mystification, creeds, and dogmas to reveal one of the reasons for Russian distrust
of America.
Another instance of pragmatic
analysis of dogma is explained in accounts of arguments
of so-called revisionists, who claim that the Nazi gas chambers never existed. Ian MacKenzie
has observed that while such outrageous beliefs may never be fully understood, they can be
clarified and countered, rather than being rationalized as part of the uncontrollably figural
nature of language.
MacKenzie begins with Paul de Man's
conclusion that knowledge is contained in written
texts rather than empirical facts (284). Because such knowledge is written, it is vulnerable to
re-writing. The self-fashioned symbols that form the language of knowledge, the primary way
of knowing whatever there is to be known, thus exist as what Wallace Stevens called a
fiction--a coherent and meaningful, but all-too-human, construction.
Continuing a line of de-emphasis of
Enlightenment rationalism is Richard Rorty's
pragmatic acceptance of the necessity of constant re-descriptions of the world. Emphasis is
placed on how these redescriptions function and how they are an effective tool for those who
would hope their redescriptions will be taken up by others. Imagination, metaphor, and
self-creation, in contrast to rationality and argument, are offered as the most effective
methods of redescriptions with potential for cultural change (285).
Examples of redescriptions are
described thus: "The major narrative forms of Holocaust
texts are the diary, the memoir, the historian's 'factual' text, and the novel" (288). The diary is
said to impose the temporal order of hours, days, or weeks; the memoir is contextualized by
its ending; and novels of the Holocaust incorporate memoirs as documentary material
because of their quality of authority.
In addition, in support of
autobiographical forms, ideas that selfhood and will need to
be eliminated as a means of avoiding gratuitous and irresponsible texts are subordinated to
the value of constituting and preserving self as a moral force through writing. MacKenzie
emphasizes this by strongly suggesting the technicalities of argumentation, a strategy used by
revisionist historians of the Holocaust, can be overcome by similarly strong redescription
stressing "the necessarily narrative nature of understanding and how this determines
expression" (291).
MacKenzie's discussion of the
significance of stories and how they are told, and of
imagination rather than reason as the central human faculty, echoes the work of many
contemporary American Indian writers, especially {7}
writers of disturbing memoirs, such as
Wendy Rose and Janet Campbell Hale. Also, consider Leslie Marmon Silko's pragmatic
account of language in her 1977 novel Ceremony:
I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.
He rubbed his belly.
I keep them here
[he said]
Here, put your hand on it
See, it is moving.
There is life here
for the people.
And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing. (2)
It has been the stories of
American Indians, more than anything else, that has allowed
them to survive in the face of such destructive forces as policies of extermination, allotment,
and assimilation. Richard Rorty has captured the essence of such survival in his observation
that "a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of
cultural change" (7).
Examination of existing American
Indian literatures reveals a pragmatic and humanist
authorial personality determined to constitute and preserve American Indians by writing. In
addition, however, much critical work remains to be done. First, narrative history written by
and about American Indians needs to be reviewed. To continue to avoid truly reckoning with
the genocide perpetrated upon the original inhabitants of the Americas is to perpetuate
dangerous falsehoods. To accept the band-aids offered by {8} superficial legislation and a
few token legal decisions as a palliative to such destruction is to become even further
deluded.
Second, those works received as
fiction need to be analyzed far beyond the usual
structuralist and romantic concerns used to legitimize them to mainstream audiences. They
then need to be put into current context, and interpreted as part of a coherent body of work.
There is a rich vein of American Indian fiction that has done a superb job of recovering
important elements of cultures and identities. As suggested by Jack Forbes, however, there
has not been a set of criteria generated from that body of work that is also forward-looking
in terms of being responsive to the political needs of indigenous peoples.
Third, hard questions need to be
addressed concerning the responsibility of Indian
intellectuals to indigenous people living less fortunate lives in reservation and urban
communities. Within this process special attention needs to be paid to the questions
articulated by Robert Warrior: 1) what should the roles of intellectuals be in the struggle for
American Indian freedom? 2) what are the sources we should use in developing an American
Indian criticism? 3) do these approaches allow us to reflect in our work the actually-lived,
contemporary experiences of American Indian people? (84).
Political needs may be better
understood in light of Jonathan Boyarin's analysis of the
relations of Jews and Indians in Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish
Memory.
Boyarin discusses how European and American mainstreams create fascinated images of and
eulogize the other's victim, and the juxtaposition of "native" voices inside the respective
empires as a way of resisting (9-10). Boyarin does not mince words, stating that contrasting
fictions by French Jew Patrick Odiano and American Indian Gerald Vizenor are "the voices
of survivors, written after genocide, on the soil of genocide" (12).
The problem of the genocide
perpetuated against the indigenous peoples of the
Americas, to say nothing of the scope of that genocide, as documented by David Stannard in
American Holocaust, has yet to be fully understood. Nor has there been sufficient
discussion
of the continued genocide under which most of the survivors of the American Holocaust still
exist. Until American Indians can speak of such things as directly as does Jonathan Boyarin
on behalf of Jewish people, they will not have fully recovered their sacred duty to
community, and their discourse will be incomplete.
Robert Edwards has observed
similarities in the thinking of Tolstoy and the American
pragmatist John Dewey: "Tolstoy claimed that the masses of working people have been living
according to the true teachings of Christ, Confucius, Moses and other spiritual masters. They
have known all along to seek happiness by putting first the good of others" (22). Edwards
also notes Dewey's goal in educational reform was to transform education by {9} basing it in
lived experience (26).
Seeking individual happiness by
prioritizing the good of others echoes the manner in
which Iroquois society emphasized the role of human beings as part of a community rather
than as individuals. John Dewey's educational goal of balancing the world of ideas with lived
experience is similar to much older Lakota notions of balancing the black and red roads of
earthly and spiritual existence.
The rampant decline of concepts of
community, with attendant devaluation of life, runs
contrary to the most strident warnings of our oldest literatures. One way this trend can be
countered and redescribed is to instill in intellectuals an obligation to use their observations
and investigations to help effect the good of the human community.
Black Elk's wish that people once
more go back into the sacred hoop and John Dewey's
admonition, "The saint sits in his ivory tower while the burly sinners run the world" (Edman
23), are both expressions of pragmatic thought. Such pragmatism is hopeful not only in the
ways it illustrates connection between two disparate cultures, but for the methodology it
might provide to conduct a search, at once pragmatic and idealistic, for answers to the
problems of Native communities and the world as a whole.
WORKS CITED
Boyarin, Jonathan. Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Converse, Harriet Maxwell. Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois. Ed. Arthur C. Parker. New York State Museum and Sciences Service Bulletin 125, 1908.
Dewey, John. "Thought and its Subject-Matter." Studies in Logical Theory. University of Chicago Decennial Publications, 2nd series, vol 11. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1903.
Edman, Irwin. John Dewey: His Contribution to the American Tradition. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955.
Edwards, Robert. "Tolstoy and John Dewey: Pragmatism and Prosaics." Tolstoy Studies Journal 5 (1992): 15-36.
Flannery, Regina. The Gros Ventres of Montana. Washington DC: The Catholic U of America P, 1953.
Forbes, Jack. "Colonialism and Native American Literature: Analysis." Wicazo Sa Review 3 (1987): 17-23.
Gourevitch, Philip. "Letter From Rwanda: After The Genocide." The New Yorker {10} 18 December 1995: 87-106.
Kroeber, A. L. "Gros Ventre Myths And Tales." Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Ed. Clark Wissler. New York: American Museum of Natural History Trustees, 1908.
Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
MacKenzie, Ian. "Pragmatism, Rhetoric, and History." Poetics Today 16.2 (Summer 1995): 283-91.
Neihardt, John. Black Elk Speaks. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Parker, Arthur C. "The Code of Handsome Lake." Parker on the Iroquois. Ed. William N. Fenton. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1968.
Pratt, Scott L. "The Influence of the Iroquois on Early American Philosophy." Unpublished paper, Department of Philosophy, U of Oregon, 1996.
Remnick, David. "The War For The Kremlin." The New Yorker 22 July 1996: 40-57.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumus. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Vine Deloria, Jr., John Joseph Mathews, and the Recovery of American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services, 1994.
{11}
Walking with Jim Northrup and Sharing His "Rez"ervations
Roseanne Hoefel
After walking and talking with
Jim Northrup during his visits both to LaVonne Brown
Ruoff's 1994 NEH Seminar, "American Indian Literatures: Cultural and Literary Contexts,"
and to Alma College campus the following year, I have come to believe one of Northrup's
main goals is to tell his story from the inside out. Too often his people's story has been
uttered or constructed--falsely or partially--from the outside in. According to Northrup, the
discrepancies in the Anishinaabe story accrue to the sad fact that those who've actually lived
it have not had the opportunity to tell it or to be heard. "What I want to do is tell the real
stories, the real pain of my people," he told my American Indian Literature classes in
February, 1995. In his poetry and short fiction collection, Walking the Rez Road,
Northrup
voices these stories: of surviving the Vietnam War; of the fishing and ricing custom on his
Fond du Lac Reservation where he leads a traditional Anishinaabe life; of their recreation, as
in "Bingo Binge"; and of their relationships, as between Luke and his wife Paneque, who
mutually don "their listening faces," modeling for readers the attentiveness and respect these
testimonies merit.
"Testimonies" is a term I use
advisedly, for Northrup employs everyday language and
rejects conventional euphemisms in ways that allow the reader to bear witness to crucial
moments, through such pivotal characters as Luke Warmwater (allegedly named for the
author's promiscuous uncle who signed into hotels under this pseudonym) and Ben Looking
Back (whose name is rich in suggestion and double entendre). For example, in "Holiday
Inndians," Luke and his cousin meet an overweight woman named June. Butch {12} thinks
she is so big "she could be called June, July and part of August" (65). Unspoken yet
authentic, this candid thought suggests the disbelief on his face as he reaches for another
beer. In "War Talk," one of the many interspersed poems that punctuate the short stories
thematically, a predatory journalist asks a vet how it felt to see friends killed; he replies, "Get
the fuck out of my face," conveying his justifiable rage at the increasingly absurd line of
questioning. As Northrup informed my classes, he is cognizant and respectful of the power of
such language; that is, he doesn't use obscenity, to borrow his phrase, "just to get away with
being a potty mouth."
Clearly, Northrup is keenly aware, as
well, of the impact of his structural choices. In
spite of the fact that his misguided publishing agent had advised him that there was little, if
any, market for multiple genre work, he submitted his manuscript of poems and short stories
a day before the deadline, knowing full well such timing would not permit the press's
alteration. The prefatory poems invite reader input, especially open and conducive as they are
to varied interpretation, yet impressing upon the reader an underlying theme embedded and
developed in the story that follows. This format fosters new ideas and the consideration of
related issues; in "shrinking away," the poem that opens the collection, for instance, the
speaker has "survived the war, but was / having trouble surviving the peace" due to
"nightmares, daymares / guilt and remorse" and the V.A. saying that "Vietnam wasn't a war"
(8-9). Exploiting the rich ambiguity of the title, Northrup's speaker is referred to a
psychiatrist who charges $50/hour, when he is making a mere $125/week, to tell Luke
his
problems and then, later, to burden Luke with the renewed guilt of the psychiatrist's suicide
after Luke stops seeing him.
Realizing in the penultimate line that
"surviving the peace was up to [him]," Luke
launches into a graphic and bone-chilling, nightmarish flashback entitled "Open Heart with a
Grunt," wherein we are confronted with the blood and gore and excruciating agony of war,
its victims, and its helpless witnesses, embodied in the "gray marine" who frequently visits
Luke's nightmares. Herein, in addition to the unforgettable depiction of the grunt's instruction
to pump and pulse a dying comrade's organs, we learn that time stops during the insanity of
such moments indelibly etched in the future veteran's mind and heart, "trapped inside their
minds with the memories of what they saw, heard and felt," creating his dire need for intense
coping skills. What's new here, perhaps only hinted at in the preceding poem, is the gross
injustice of domino-effect death, which does not permit the outward expression of mourning.
Death's relentless immediacy necessitates that the grief and loss be internalized (and
repressed), even when "[t]ime returned to normal as the doctor came out and told them the
gray marine died on the table. They got back into the chopper for the return {13} to the
scene of the firefight" (13).
Not surprisingly, Northrup elaborates
upon such endless horrors in two poems and
stories that follow. "Wahbegan" is a eulogy to his brother who "died in the war / but didn't
fall down / for fifteen tortured years," finally relieving himself of his misery by walking into
traffic. "How about a memorial," the speaker asks, "for those who made it / through the war
/ but still died / before their time?" (14), particularly since almost two times the number who
died in the Vietnam War met their end through suicide.
In the second of these two,"Mine of
Mine," readers are on the edge of their seats as
Luke walks point, "a pedestrian's nightmare" Northrup's ironic wit interjects. Moreover, this
is a nightmare reserved especially for Native American pedestrians, the white self-serving
stereotype of whom claims they are allegedly genetically predisposed to negotiate minefields.
Northrup reminds us here that both World War II and the Korean War incurred a
disproportionately high incidence of Native casualties due to walking point. We are,
alternately, gripped by stunning bylines like "He was staring down at his own funeral," jarred
by such sobering passages as "Luke's morals were on hold, so were his feelings. He thought
of his trigger finger as the judge, jury, and executioner. Luke was a young killing machine
trying to stay alive "(15), and riveted by the pitiable comic relief of such subtleties as the
telling absence of the refrain "that wouldn't work" at the close of the following passage:
Now what? he thought. Out in the open pinned by a mine. He started to think of ways to get off the mine. Let's see now, I could put my helmet and flak jacket over the mine and dive away from the blast. That wouldn't work, he might be diving on another mine. I could just stay here and live out the rest of my life anchored to this mine, he thought. That wouldn't work, the sniper might forget his third person rule. I could shit my pants, he thought. (16)
Northrup proceeds to walk us haltingly through this danger zone, delineating his character's otherwise intricately unfathomable sensations, including his disbelief when he is safely delivered of the wire and his instantaneous shock when his fellow marine "disappeared in a cloud of dirty smoke [h]is crumpled body thrown to the ground" (17), and Luke holds his dead hand until the chopper arrives. Here, the chopper aptly serves as the daunting auditory motif which links him and us to the present moment as the reader becomes aware only now that this entire story was yet another vivid flashback incurred by his visit to "the Wall, the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial" after he'd read "the book of the dead":
When he found the marine's name, he reached up and {13} touched the letters cut into stone. When he did, he felt relieved, almost like he had been carrying a pack for the past twenty years and could now take it off. He offered tobacco as his eyes began to burn and fill with tears.
A bearded vet came over. He wore a faded camouflage jacket. His baseball cap proudly proclaimed that he was a Vietnam vet. He hugged Luke and said, "Welcome home, brother." (18-19)
Understandably, the reader is
eager for the comic respite his gut-honest opening lines of
the following poem provide as we begin "walking point" with him: "his asshole puckered up
tight" (20). This brief relief replenishes the courage we need to absorb the understated
message of the fifth stanza: "He sang to himself as / his senses gathered evidence / of his
continued existence" (20), the intensity of which the speaker likewise alleviates with a
momentary lapse into humor: "He amused himself as he walked along. / The old story about
bullets, ha, / don't sweat the ones that got your / name, worry about the ones addressed: / to
whom it may concern" (21). After he puts his training into practice, he reflects: "The
shooting is over in five seconds / the shakes are over in a half-hour / the memories are over
never" (21), in this instance not followed by a joke to spare us the implications of
this terrible
and shameful reality.
We continue our excursion with
Northrup, this time over the literal and figurative
bridge that links the strategic opening Vietnam theme--strategic because even the most
resisting or biased reader can't help but be hooked by Northrup's moving rendition of a
universally potent subject--with the stories and poems of everyday reservation life. In
"Veteran's Dance," Luke's cousin, Lug, attends a powwow and visits his concerned and
supportive sister, complete with comforting cornbread, both of which prove, again literally
and figuratively, instrumental to his healing. "Ever since the war he felt disconnected from
the things that made people happy" (22). Familiarity grounds him in recovery, not only of his
roots and origins, but of his sense of belonging:
Sitting in a red-and-white-striped powwow chair was an old lady who looked like his grandma. She wore heavy brown stockings held up with a big round knot at the knees. She chewed Copenhagen and spit the juice in a coffee can just like his gram. Of course, Lug's grandma had been dead for ten years, but it was still a good feeling to see someone who looked like her. (23)
Therapeutic humor surfaces, as well, when Luke's cousin stops "at a food stand called Stand
Here" (23). When Lug confesses to his sister the grueling accidental shooting of an incognito
female enemy soldier, Judy tries through {15} her
trembling and tears to console him with
the fact that he won a Purple Heart. We learn vet lingo, then, for Lug and his comrades
disdainfully termed the Purple Hearts "Idiot Awards. It meant that you fucked up somehow"
(29). Judy facilitates Lug's and the reader's relief through a visit to a spiritual man's house,
attendance at a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Program, and her generous offer to him of
her MIA husband's ceremonial regalia. This contemporary blend of recuperative gestures
evokes the midewiwin, whereby shamanic insight and a drum ceremony combine
to offer a
mystical cure (Grim 56-73). Northrup dances us through to healing humor with cousin
Fuzzy's "new flavor for Vietnam Vets: Agent Grape" joke at which "both [men] laughed at
themselves for laughing" (34).
We join the laughter with the
undeniably "poetic" description of the quintessential "rez
car" which follows. This is our official vehicle to the rez road where we come to understand
both what it is to be "broke" and to live rich, that is, surrounded by relatives. The most
comprehensive journey manifests itself in this used, loud, steering wheel-less, defunct-radio
car for which none "of the tires are brothers"; yet, like the survivor it represents, it still stops
and starts, and thereby demonstrates survival strategies from the survivor's point of view:
"What else is a car / supposed to do?" is the closing question, one which resonates almost
nostalgically in Northrup's claim that casino profits may make rez cars an endangered
species.
Likewise, what else is this
Anishinaabe, Vietnam vet, brother, husband, father, tour
guide of the rez supposed to do, except sustain the reader's own journey, through such casual
conversation as the opening question of the eulogy to his brother: "Didja ever hear a sound?"
Our walk with him is comfortable and non-threatening yet simultaneously powerful and
effective. We are not embarrassed by his stated goal in this collection, for his "brain to take a
shit," which is part of the book's universal appeal. While stories about ricing (e.g., "Work
Ethic" and "Ricing Again") are specific glimpses into traditional Fond du Lac lifeways,
largely the selections are about being human. How many of us nod in laughter to "Bloody
Money" which is reminiscent of a time we were so broke we sold our plasma? How many of
us revisit memories so vivid we are all but transported to past faces and locales? Ingeniously,
even Northrup's specific allusion to the once-popular denial of the Vietnam War's existence
and ramifications subtly bespeaks a similar pattern of willful ignorance and omission from
consciousness surrounding the near genocide of Native peoples. Readers can't help but draw
parallels between these two tragedies. This unconventional coupling is but one didactic
tactic.
As one student, a police officer and
older, attested in his journal for the American
Indian Literature course I taught in 1995:
{16}
[O]ne of Northrop's main purposes for writing is to educate . . . us stupid white folks on his culture. When he was reading the questions that people ask him, and answering most with cutting sarcasm and humor, I thought that what bothered him most was that white people still have not learned diddly squat about Native American culture. We still believe the stereotypes and the John Wayne films. In Walking the Rez Road, we get a no nonsense work which highlights just what it is like to be a Native American in today's society. It means to be poor and treated like a criminal. The way he does this educating is humorous and entertaining, but it is also sad.
His stories are funny, but they have a bite to them. When I read his accounts of life, I was filled with remorse and guilt. One story which spoke to me was "Culture Clash," when Luke came across his brother Almost and rushed him to the hospital. Then Luke ended up in jail and his brother joined him. The tendency for the police to assume the worst and the ready way they beat the Natives up depressed me, especially when I remember that most of the stories are true.
Northrup also wants things to change. He wants understanding, and the first step is education. We have to realize there is a problem, then we can change things.
To be sure, other readers recognize the symbolism of that sobering story, "Culture Clash,"
and "Wewiibitaan" (which means "Hurry Up"), even amidst our laughter at the absurdity of a
kneejerk, if not hysterical, reaction by police officers who establish a roadblock for one
Indian youth who resisted the ego-gratifying authorities' abuse. Another effective teaching
tool is the unadulterated expression of anger. Meriting the poet's wrath, for example, is the
popularization by Hollywood and 1980s presidents of the Vietnam War. Too little, too late,
after two decades of neglect, abuse, or sheer indifference, according to "time wounds all
heels." In this poem Northrup catalogues the manifestation of what he refers to in
"ogichidag" (warriors) as "the bitterness of / the only war America ever lost" (164). Written
on the eve of Northrup's own son's potential debarkation to the Gulf War, the poem offers a
litany of the twentieth-century wars that have painfully informed the lives of the speaker's
male relatives, the war stories a trademark of the surviving warriors.
In similar fashion, Northrup tells
other
stories of survival. In "Work Ethic" Luke seeks a
means to paying his bills and to evading imprisonment due to delinquent child support,
though he is not willing to compromise his sense of self in the process. For example, when he
begins to cast the same "vacant" smiles of his co-workers at the pizza shop, he seeks
employment elsewhere. Unfortunately losing his "dream job" due to the indiscretion of
sleeping on a waterbed as a promotional gimmick, Luke works in a machine {17} shop until
he realizes he'd become an extension of it. In every case, other "ethics" take precedence over
the blind subservience which the dominant culture designates as "work."
Significantly, the job Luke most
enjoys is culturally based, as we discover in "Ricing
Again." Here we glimpse the culmination of Northrup's summer rice-fanning basket-crafting,
to which he pays tribute in the poem "Weegwas" (birch bark), "another gift from the
Creator" (78), an art that has been passed down from grandfather to grandson for centuries.
As Northrup puts it, for the Anishinaabe, "ricing is never more than eleven months away."
Ricing also serves as an incentive to halt the community binge that Northrup depicts in "Your
Standard Drunk" as being fueled by whites who still bring alcohol by the truckload to the rez.
Ricing's social and practical benefits make this pivotal activity a community favorite:
He knew the people enjoyed ricing and there were good feelings all around. As he drove to the lake, memories of past ricing seasons came to him. His earliest memories were of playing on the shore while his parents were out ricing. Years seemed to melt from people. Grandparents moved about with a light step and without their canes. Laughing and loud talking broke out frequently. The cool crisp morning air, the smell of wood smoke, roasting meat, and coffee were all part of these early childhood memories.
When he grew older, his responsibilities increased. He took care of his brothers and sisters. He cleaned the canoes and rice boats of every last kernel of rice. He learned how to make rice poles and knockers. He learned how important ricing was to the people. (94)
Reciprocal giving rules the day, and the rhythm of the falling rice "made Luke feel good"
(95), as does the echo of laughter throughout their ritual. The rich tradition that accrues to
this practice, described by awestruck ethnographers as early as the 1900s (Densmore 128),
Northrup vividly evokes in his warm and moving poem "Mahnomin" (wild rice). From the
tobacco offering of thanks and the personification of calm water, rice heads, wind, and
smiling sun, to the "talk of other lakes, other seasons / fingers stripping rice while / laughing,
gossiping, remembering," the ricers feel good and contribute to another canoeful of
memories that constitute the natural progression of generations (98).
Indeed it is the strength born of being
one of the Anishinaabe generations, in "brown
and white peek," that enables the stamina and spirituality essential to overcoming the
"manifest destiny dominant society" (105) and avoiding its excesses. Replete with the ironies
that accompany the persistence of myth and stereotype which spawn such lame questions as
the {18} voyeuristic one that opens the poem, "What's it
like living on the rez?," the reply
offers some poetic justice, finds "something good / in something grim" (104), by redeeming
chronic unemployment "when the white guys get lung cancer / from breathing asbestos at the
mill."
No wonder, thus, that Northrup's
fiction walks the reader "a mile in [his] moccasins"
(105) surrounding the un(der)employment scene alone. For example, "The Odyssey" is
another comical job hunt story, this time involving a "rez truck," the back of which is filled
with exaggerated coup tales, including those involving jail time. A series of mishaps--the
truck door and fan belt falling off, the engine catching fire--ironically brings the aspiring
laborers three weeks' work and even more joke material than they'd anticipated. This is the
case as well in "The Yellow Hand Clan," where Luke and his friend, Rod Grease, do hard
summer labor building basements, complete with slapstick antics, long enough to collect
unemployment through the winter months.
Also laced with slapstick is "Fritz and
Butch," who entertain media personnel and
themselves at the Duluth Radisson Hotel by performing Nixon impersonations and signing
autographs as then-Vice President Mondale must have. Here, rather than steady work, it is
the familiar, the fun, the effort to "snag" three White Earth reservation women that warms
Luke with a smile and assures him that "Life was back to normal" (52).
To maintain that normalcy or
stability,
the speaker in the "end of the beginning" poem
proffers, one must heed the wisdom of the oral tradition. "Someone said" and "Another old
saying says" are phrases calling readers back to oral wisdom, the central message of which is
to live like each day is one's last (68). This wisdom of the ages literally takes the shape of a
tipi in "tipi reflections," which the speaker joyfully and peacefully inhabits, observing both
current and timeless miracles and images that signify his origins:
The smell of wood smoke
clings to me when I have to
go to the city, it is a
reminder of where I come from
and where I'm going. (62)
This caution would have been sound advice for the "three skins" in the vignette that follows,
"Coffee Donuts" (69-71). Happy to be alive, free, and "cashy," these riders are revelling in
their day of mobility and fun, anticipating hunting or reading O. Henry stories, completely
oblivious to the grain truck with sleeping driver barrelling toward them--a frightful scenario
Northrup had foreshadowed thirty pages earlier in his poem "death two." A cautionary poem
of a different nature occurs in the center of the collection, {19}"Lifetime of sad." This poem
originated, according to Northrup, as an alternative to becoming angry or hurtful toward the
lonely, alcoholic, 50-year-old woman it sympathetically portrays. As the title suggests, her
eyes tell the heart-wrenching story of a wife, widowed twice over by "the white man's wars,"
of a mother left behind, and of a cancer survivor who is losing a more insidious "battle with
the bottle" (84).
Poetry serves a different function in
"where you from?," which Northrup cited as a
question "Shinnobs" always ask each other upon meeting, as a way to connect or to discover
if there's any relation. This poem, then, is his artistic effort to respond by describing Sawyer
with its wild rice lakes, abundant sugar trees, sacred ceremonies, other natural beauties, and,
interspersed throughout, rich survival humor: "Hocking a satellite dish for bingo / is possible
but difficult" (91).
Another poem addressing the
speaker's identity is "barbed thoughts," which resonates
with the pride of his spear-fishing heritage and defiance of redneck opposition to their
hunting, gathering, and eating rights, which troublemakers dismiss as "Treaty" rights. This
understandably angry poem spits at the indignities of "threats, gunfire, and bombs," of
state-proposed "buyout[s]," of greedy and insensitive media columnists and newscasters
(136), the entire complex of which tries to deracinate Anishinaabe from "their generational
wisdom."
Less terse, the story which follows,
"Jabbing and Jabbering," exposes more fully the
hinted-at corrupt reservation government that is willing to put a price tag on heritage.
Northrup describes the Reservation Business Committee's conspicuous consumption,
gluttony, betrayal, and deceit--the latter, for example, in pacifying the "renegades" who
would resist the leasing of property rights by fabricating some makeshift work project. In
contrast to the cynicism with which the author develops such scenes, he delivers the actual
spear-fishing expedition with grace and poetic imagery, including the good-hearted donation
of their productive night on the water to the Elderly Nutrition Program. The RBC's main
concern in the face of the pervasive protest that ensued from the disclosure of their
treaty-leasing is the potential effect upon their re-election. Their feeble and insincere attempt
to save face by spear-fishing with Tuna Charlie and Luke backfires when the latter alert the
media. Sweet and subtle revenge results from the RBC Chair and District Two
Representative's comedy of errors, which leave them capsized, dripping wet, and fishless in
the glare of TV cameras panning the ridiculous scene.
A more biting indictment pervades
"1854-1988," the poem that follows; in this case, the
just reward for bureaucratic sellouts is their grandchildren "piss[ing] on their graves" (148).
The sardonic and frequent refrain, "The bottom line is the bottom line," mocks the platitudes
tribal government, such {20} as the one which chastised
Northrup for the criticism in this
poem, spouts to placate the people they diminish in what the author portrays as their
materialistic and egocentric inclination.
Northrup's collection is about
survivors of oppression, trying to outlive the
circumstances to which they've been sentenced and attempting to withstand acculturation, or
alcoholism, or the struggle to obliterate someone else's oppression yet furthering their own in
the process. Northrup skillfully debunks one superficial museumgoer's desire to reify Indians
as safely antiquated relics of the past, learning about them through objectification
rather than
from them through interaction. This scenario is hilariously depicted in the story
"Looking
with Ben": here, Ben Looking Back makes a "contemporary Chippewa" sign, stands beside
it, and then leaves, resulting in an empty display which poignantly drives home to the rez and
our minds the idea that Natives have been excluded from common consciousness. It is no
surprise that Northrup drafted this, in my view, now perfect piece six times in order to be
able to play with language, as he so ably achieves in the scene where Ben tells Luke of his
charades:
"With some of them, I was a Chippewa, with others, I was a Sioux. Sometimes I'd be a Comanche, and right at the end there, I was telling them I was half Chippewa, half Ojibway, and the rest was Anishinaabe. Some of the tourists were writing this stuff down as I talked. I had a good time with the tourists," Ben concluded. (159)
Here, Northrup enacts his credo that whites were put here to amuse Indians. Neither an
apology or plea, this saga of triumphs and failures, from the pain of familial loss to the
slapstick of Ben's Smithsonian escapades, guides the reader intimately through the lifestyle
and problems that accrue to Rez inhabitants: high unemployment, scarce funds, and
government difficulties, largely the result of white negligence and ignorance.
Luke, like Ben, never loses his vital
sense of humor, laughing and crying in the same
breath, yet resoundingly choosing laughter as a remedy to turmoil, to the death and prejudice
inhering in what Northrup refers to as "the hate circle" of racism that surrounds them and
makes the rez a haven for rejuvenation and solitudinous grace. In this way and others, he is
an ideal embodiment of what Craig Womack advocated at the 1995 Modern Language
Association conference: one who writes to and for his people, in a variety of genres and
venues. For example, Northrup linguistically circumvents this hate circle by translating into
Ojibway most of his poems; he continues to write bilingually as a sign of silent yet poignant
protest. More vocal is his "Fond du Lac Follies" column wherein he writes on various
minority issues such as Indian gaming and gambling, the latter of {21} which he views as a
current test of Indian spirit and integrity, a mixed blessing and curse as both a source of
employment and income, yet a locus for corruption.
Northrup is among 50,000 Natives in
Minnesota, one of five or six among 300 or so
Native Minnesotan authors who write for a living, maintaining a question-of-the-month
catalogue since, as he claims with a grin, "whites are such slow learners." Here, he deploys
such unforgettable zingers as: "How long have you been an Indian?" "46 years. It would've
been 47 but I was sick a year"; and "Do you speak your language?" "Yup, yours too"; and,
my personal favorite: "Are Indians really psychic?" "I knew you were going to ask
me that, I
just knew it!" (campus reading, 15 February 1995). With such wit and multiple
gifts, it's not
surprising that Northrup's work is award winning, securing both the Sixth Annual
Northeastern Minnesota Award, which recognizes books that best represent Northeastern
Minnesota's history, culture, heritage, or lifestyle, and the Minnesota Book Award in the
personal voices category, having been chosen from 68 nominees in 14 categories.
Northrup is generous to walk readers
through not only the minefields he and the
Anishinaabe have already negotiated and continue to negotiate, but also through the veritable
gold mine of riches they inhabit. A poem that embodies this strolling metaphor, "Walking
through," shows poetry in yet another light. Here the speaker metaphorically pays tribute to
his wife and the solidness of their loveship, for instance as they trudged through swamps,
content to experience "the trees, the tracks, the quiet" (112). Readers, too, are enriched by
the journey in his moccasins, through landscapes and soundscapes we won't soon forget.
Clearly, then, we would do well to heed Joy Harjo's wise advice on the dust jacket: "These
stories are full of laughter and the wisdom that is gained from heartbreak and loss. Pass them
on!"
WORKS CITED
Densmore, Frances. Chippewa Customs. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1979.
Grim, John. Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1983.
Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Customs. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
Northrup, Jim. Campus reading, Alma College, 15 February 1995.
---. Walking the Rez Road. Stillwater MN: Voyageur, 1993.
{22}
Shaman or Showman
Mace J. DeLorme
{23}
Stories, Humor, and Survival in Jim Northrup's Walking the Rez Road
Chris LaLonde
Crossblood Anishinaabe writer
Gerald Vizenor takes part of the title for Wordarrows:
Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade, his 1978 collection of narratives, from N. Scott
Momaday's retelling of the traditional Kiowa story of the arrowmaker. A Kiowa was making
arrows one night when he noticed someone looking in from outside. He continued his work,
straightening an arrow with his teeth and fitting it to his bow to be sure it would draw true,
all the while talking with his wife as he aimed the arrow at random. As if addressing her, he
said, "I know that you are there on the outside. . . . If you are a Kiowa, you will understand
what I am saying, and you will speak your name" (qtd. in Wordarrows viii).
Receiving no
answer, the arrowmaker had his aim fall upon the enemy outside, let the arrow fly, and killed
him. The story is important for Momaday and Vizenor, and others, because it indicates that
language can be used as an effective weapon in the struggle for survival.
In the written tradition of the
Anishinaabe we can see this awareness of language's
power at least since the mid-nineteenth-century writings of George Copway, or
Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh. For instance, in The Ojibway Conquest (1850), a long poem
written in
heroic couplets, Wen-di-go tells Me-gi-si that, while he could easily have taken his life, he
has "a tale will pierce thy heart / Worse than a foeman's dart,--" (29). Over a century later,
contemporary Anishinaabe writers Vizenor, Gordon Henry, Jr., Louise Erdrich, Kimberly
Blaeser, and others indicate a similar understanding of language's power and use words to
craft poems and stories in the name of survival. Blaeser, for instance, puts the case clearly:
"Like many Indian people, I write partly to remember, because remembering, we recover;
{24} remembering, we survive" (xi). Such is also true
for fellow Anishinaabe Jim Northrup,
the author of poems, stories, newspaper columns, a play, and the 1993 collection Walking
the Rez Road. Contrary to the ethnographic and historical studies of the Anishinaabe that
Vizenor takes to task in The People Named the Chippewa for inventing tribal
people and
culture, Northrup's book is a striking imagining and rendering of contemporary Anishinaabe
life. And in the tradition of works by Copway, Vizenor, and others, Walking the Rez
Road
stresses the importance of language, stories, and humor to survival.
Walking the Rez Road is a
collection of twenty-one poems and twenty-one stories
whose subjects include the Vietnam war, Anishinaabe culture and history, and contemporary
reservation life. The overall picture created for the reader is produced in part by the order of
the pieces that Northrup stipulated contrary to his publisher's suggestion. It is worth
remarking that Native scholars and storytellers have recognized the importance of sequence
in Anishinaabe storytelling sessions. In thinking about stories told concerning the tribal
trickster and culture hero Nanabush, for instance, Ridie Wilson Ghezzi notes that "the way
they are joined together depends on the artistry and the intentions of the narrator" (445).
Skill and intent, then, shape the sessions in a fashion Ron Evans sees as akin "to a piece of
beadwork: one could create a different picture depending on how one strung the beads
together" (qtd. in Ghezzi 445). In Walking the Rez Road Northrup begins stringing
texts
together with a poem whose first word, "Survived," highlights the subject of survival which
resonates throughout the book (8). Like Abel in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of
Dawn,
Tayo in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Whirling Soldier in Joy Harjo's
"Northern
Lights," the poem's narrator has "Survived the war" but is "having trouble surviving / the
peace" (8). He turns to a psychologist to help him deal with the "Nightmares, daymares /
guilt and remorse" (8). He stops seeing the "shrink" both because of the expense and because
it was not doing him any good, experiences more guilt when the psychologist kills himself,
and finally realizes "that surviving / the peace was up to me" (9).
Walking the Rez Road is
concerned with far more than a veteran surviving a war and its
effects on the psyche, however, whether that veteran is the nameless narrator of the war
poems in the text; Lug, whose story is told in "Veteran's Dance"; Lug's cousin Luke
Warmwater, ostensively the protagonist of the book; or Vietnam vet Northrup himself.
Rather, Walking the Rez Road makes clear that the veterans are only a part of the
greater
Anishinaabe population that has been and is continually faced with the problem of
survivance.1 Like Blaeser, Northrup would have his readers remember, or learn
and
remember, and two poems in particular up the ante {25}
to include not just the survival of
war veterans and contemporary shinnobs, but all the people at least since the signing of the
1854 La Pointe treaty which ceded Anishinaabe homeland in the arrowhead region of
Minnesota to the United States Government: "1854-1988" and "ditched."
"1854-1988" links the original treaty
signers with contemporary tribal government
leaders acting contrary to the best interests of the people. The La Pointe treaty signers gave
up the land even though their people told them not to sell. Placing a dollar value on the land
and traditional lifeways is at the heart of the outrage:
You sold our birthright, you paleface Indians.
Faces pale from kissing the white man's ass.
The bottom line is the bottom line.
The State flashes chump change,
indigent Indians are buffaloed.
Hunting, fishing, and gathering
now have a dollar value.
The bottom line is the bottom line. (148)
The repetition of "The bottom line is the bottom line" throughout the poem accentuates the
disabling truth at its heart: "Money talks, whispers, threatens, / and finally seduces" (148).
Vizenor notes in his introduction to
Summer in the Spring that "The fur traders learned
the languages and stories of the woodland and enmeshed tribal families in the predatory
economics of peltry" (7). Money, alcohol, and material goods were the tools of seduction
used to lure the Anishinaabe away from traditional lifeways and enmesh them in a fur trade
that "interposed economic anomalies between the intuitive rhythms of woodland tribal
communities and the spiritual equipose of the traditional anishinaabe"
(Summer 7-8). The
people were indeed "buffaloed": literally and figuratively slaughtered by the United States
Government thanks to its plan of relocation to reservations like White Earth and Fond du
Lac, and assimilation once there.
The narrator of "1854-1988" refuses
to succumb to despair, however; rather, we are
reminded that "Anishinaabe have survived / missionaries and miners, / timber barons and
trappers," and told they will "survive the bureaucrats / and policy makers" (148) as well.
They will also remember their ancestors who sold out:
Bury the sellouts deep, their
grandchildren will want to
piss on their graves.
The bottom line is the bottom line. (148)
The poem closes on a note of appropriation rather than assimilation, as the {26} bottom line
is transformed from an economic phrase to a moral one and becomes the grandchildren's
graphic indication and indictment of the immorality of their grandparents' actions.
"Ditched," a poem focusing on the
plight of a young Anishinaabe at the Pipestone
federal boarding school, makes clear one of the primary difficulties faced by subsequent
generations after the signing of the La Pointe treaty, a difficulty which if not overcome would
mean there will be no grandchildren able and willing to urinate on the graves of
wrong-minded tribal leaders. The system of boarding schools set up by organized religions
and the Federal government in the nineteenth century was designed to accelerate the process
of acculturation and assimilation by breaking the connection between Anishinaabe youth,
their families, their sense of place, their language, and their stories.2 The poem's
protagonist
receives only an "icy blue-eyed stare" when he says hello to a white in Anishinaabemowin
and a beating from a second grader after crying about the icy stare. The boy runs away, gets
caught, and is beaten by both the whites for running and a second grader for crying about the
beating he has received. As is the case with "1854-1988," however, "ditched" does not end
on a despairing note. Rather, we learn that the young Anishinaabe "Toughed it out /
Survived" (72). We do not learn specifically how the boy "toughed it out," which is in
keeping with a Native tenet of having the story resonate beyond the words in the imagination
and experiences of the audience,3 but we know that he survived. The lack of
terminal
punctuation at the end of the poem, moreover, indicates that the struggle for survival
continues for the Anishinaabe today.
The reality of Native life on the Rez
road makes survival difficult, of course, and
Northrup does not shy away from presenting an honest picture of the reservation. For
instance, the narrator of "brown and white peek" responds to the question "What's it like
living on the rez?" by pointing out that "The word reservation is a misnomer / reserved for
who? / The white man owns 80 percent of my rez . . ." (104). The Anishinaabe are nearly as
jobless as they are landless: there is "70 percent unemployment on the rez / go down the road
a few miles, it's 5 percent" (104). Anishinaabe writer, educator, and activist Winona LaDuke
uses statistics from a study done at the White Earth reservation to show the importance of a
"land-based economy and way of life" in the face of seemingly staggering economic hardship.
"While unemployment was listed by the Department of Labor at approximately 75 percent,
most people were 'employed' in a land-based economy" (xiii-xiv) that features such
traditional activities as sugarbushing and the harvesting of fowl, small and large game, fish,
and wild rice. Using White Earth as her example, LaDuke concludes that "in many Native
communities the traditional land-based economy, and in fact this way of life, remains a
centerpiece of the community" (xiv).
{27}
Perhaps more so than any of his
contemporaries, Northrup celebrates in poetry and
fiction the traditional land-based economy and material culture of the Anishinaabe. Poems
like "end of the beginning," "weegwas," "mahnomin," and "walking through" highlight both
the traditional lifeways and the essential connections between the individual, ancestors, and
the natural world which they help to establish and maintain. For instance, in "weegwas" the
narrator points out that in gathering birch bark s/he is "Just doing what grandpa did / like his
grandpa before him" (78). In "walking through," being awakened by the sun, walking in the
woods by "an old sugar bush" with a loved one, and recognizing that "the wigwam frame is
in a good location" (112) bring together past, present, and future, the Creator, and a wife and
husband in a fashion that has nothing to do with capitalist economics and money and
everything to do with the traditional lifeways of the people. Those lifeways, as Vizenor
points out, are intimately connected to the strong woods of northern Minnesota, where
The Anishinaabe learned to hear the seasons by natural reason, and tribal dreamers heard the stories of creation in bangishimog noodin, the west wind, their relations to the animals, birds, stones, the heat of visions, and the everlasting circles of the sun and moon and human heart. The first tribal families trailed the shores of gichigami to the hardwoods and marshes where they touched the maple trees for ziizibaakwadaaboo in the spring, speared fish on the rivers, and then gathered manoomin, wild rice in the late autumn. (Summer 5)
"Mahnomin," Northrup's poem
about the annual gathering of wild rice, indicates how
taking part in an aspect of the traditional lifeways of the Anishinaabe reaffirms the essential
connection with place and family. The poem opens with an image of spirituality and
thanksgiving and proceeds with language which makes clear that the relationship between the
people and the place is reciprocal, genuine, and sensuous. The lake "welcomed" the people,
the rice "nodded in agreement" with the lake, and the "sun smiled everywhere" (98). The
people, in turn, "caressed" the ripe rice heads in loving thanks for the gift. "Ricing again,
megwetch Munido" (98) explicitly thanks the Creator for enabling the people to gather the
rice; the people are as thankful for the reaffirmation of the lifeways and the connection with
place given by Munido as they are for the rice which will help them survive the coming
winter.
Ricing connects people with place,
with Munido, with each other, with past
generations, and with the future:
Relatives came together
talk of other lakes, other seasons
fingers stripping rice while
{28}
laughing, gossiping, remembering.
It's easy to feel a part of
the generations that have
riced here before. (98)
Northrup's characters can be glad for the natural world unspoiled by "progress," for "the colors of blue and green [that] rest the eyes and spirits" ("where you from?" 91), and--perhaps most of all--for the sense of place and connection established and reaffirmed by the nearness of generations past. Moreover, the "Tobacco [that] swirled in the lake" (98) as offering to the rice and Munido likewise unites the people with future harvests on this lake. Therefore it is small wonder that
It felt good to get on the lake
it felt better getting off
carrying a canoe load of food
and centuries of memories. (98)
Nevertheless, as Northrup points
out in "barbed thoughts," attempting to hunt, fish, and
gather in accordance with the lifeways and the rights granted by treaty can run contrary to
the wishes of the reservation government because "it makes some white people mad" and can
lead "rednecks [to] try to stop us / with threats, gunfire, and bombs" (136).
Walking the Rez Road makes
clear that stories and humor are important weapons with
which to counter threats from what Northrup labels "the manifest destiny dominant society"
and insure survival. Again Northrup's poem opening the volume is instructive. For in addition
to highlighting the fundamental issue of survival with its first word, "shrinking away"
emphasizes stories and suggests a telling juxtaposition between ways of seeing stories and
their value. "Shrinking away" is both a turning to the healing power of stories and a turning
away from psychoanalysis, a white way of healing predicated on stories. Life stories told and
interrogated in the analytic session are the vehicle for the self-awareness necessary for
healing to begin. Resolutely focused on the story of the analysand's essential trauma, the
interrogation strives to illuminate the ways in which the trauma is prefigured and sought out
by the psyche, thereby illuminating the incongruity or lack of harmony between an
individual's Self and the projection of self he or she presents. Analysis may be one way of
using stories therapeutically, but "shrinking away" makes it clear that it is not the right
way.
It is obvious that the analyst violates
the analyst/analysand relationship. The narrator
tells us that they
Spent six
sessions establishing
rapport, heard about his
{29}
military life,
his homosexuality,
his fights with his mother
and anything else he wanted
to talk about. (8-9)
The analyst shrinks from his role as the mostly silent partner in the relationship and instead
tells his story and reveals his trauma. Such a perversion dooms the relationship, of course,
but that is not why analysis is the wrong way to use stories therapeutically, no matter how
professionally sound the analyst. Nor does analysis fail because the analyst is white and the
analysand is not; racial identity is not revealed in the poem. Analysis cannot be the right way
for the narrator or the other characters in Walking the Rez Road to survive the
peace because
it establishes a false connection. The analyst's fee, which is stated and then twice referred to,
is the symbol of that false connection and the means by which it is perpetuated.
"Shrinking away" exposes an inherent
liability of the psychoanalytic session and ends
with the narrator's realization "that surviving / the peace was up to me," so a reader might
conclude that this means the narrator needs to establish and maintain an egocentric position
in order to survive. No conclusion could be more comforting. Maintaining that "shrinking
away" ends on a note of self-reliance enables a reader to imagine that the poem, written by a
Native American, champions one of the fundamental tenets of American ideology and as a
result indicates both an awareness of that tenet and an acknowledgement of its importance to
surviving and flourishing in contemporary America. As such, one can rest easy knowing,
thanks to a convenient extrapolation of the many from the one, that the Native Americans
have adopted the "natural" mind set and worldview of the majority culture. They have been,
at long last, assimilated. The fact that the narrator dismisses psychoanalysis, traditionally
distrusted and discounted by many Americans, is yet another point in his
favor.4
Walking the Rez Road does
not support such a reading, however. Rather, the stories
and poems make it clear that, while it is up to the individual to make the effort to survive,
survival is predicated upon connection and community as each is established in and through
stories. But while stories are integral to healing and survival, they do not in themselves
necessarily establish a true connection. In fact "The Jail Trail," a short story describing Luke
Warmwater's treatment for alcohol abuse, makes clear that stories can be abused and their
power perverted. Treatment consists of storytelling sessions centering on past episodes of
drunkenness. The stories will be accepted only "if one could work up a good cry" (87). The
hollowness of the stories told in the treatment center is indicated by the disclosure that one
must manufacture an emotional response, complete with {30} "wailing, gnashing of teeth,
and heaving sobs" (87), in designated "crying rooms." In perfect accord with the reality of
late twentieth-century American consumer culture, at the treatment center image is
everything. Luke learns from another "skin" how to act in such a place and begins "to live the
role of the drying-out-drunk" (88) in order to survive the treatment center, but that act
establishes only the most tenuous of connections because it masks rather than reveals. The
connection with the other "skin" in treatment is not predicated on stories which reveal self
and articulate connection. Rather, while his ability as a storyteller puts him "ahead of the
others in the 'group grope' sessions" (87), Luke is still subject to the misappropriation of
stories that determines the nature of the center and its treatment program. Perhaps this is
why Northrup opts not to recount the stories with which Luke Warmwater "spills his guts."
Luke must have done so in order to "graduate out into the real world," but Northrup refuses
to validate such a perversion of storytelling by including it in "The Jail Trail."
The stories told in the group sessions
of "The Jail Trail" can be juxtaposed with those in
the short story "Veteran's Dance." Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Luke's
cousin Lug has returned from the war feeling "disconnected from the things that made people
happy" (22). Although Lug recognizes that it is his fault that he cannot feel close to anyone
(23), when the story opens it is clear that he has been unable to do anything about his
predicament. Indeed, he tells his sister Judy that at one point after his return he felt like
committing suicide. His response to Judy's joy that he did not kill himself is telling: "Me too,
we wouldn't be having this conversation if I had gone through with it" (25
emphasis added).
Lug's statement stresses the importance of conversation as a means of establishing
connection, and therefore as an alternative to the ultimate disconnection of suicide. His
conversation with Judy, when he tells her several stories of Vietnam, is only the first of those
he participates in in order to "survive the peace." At the VA hospital he and other veterans
tell war stories in group therapy sessions, and after talking about their feelings toward the
war and their parts in it, Lug "felt like he was leaving some of his memories at the hospital"
(32).
While those conversations are
certainly therapeutic, Walking the Rez Road indicates
that they cannot take the place of being home and talking with family and a spiritual leader.
After leaving the hospital Lug tells Judy that while he thought it was helpful to go through
the Veteran's Administration program, "it felt better talking to the spiritual man" (33); it also
"feels better being here with relatives" (33). Thanks to sharing war stories with his sister, the
spiritual leader, and other Vietnam veterans, and hospital stories with his sister and the
spiritual man, Lug is able to do what he was unable to do at the beginning of the story:
participate in the communal celebration of {31} the
powwow and dance the veteran's honor song.
The cyclical structure of "Veteran"s
Dance," beginning and ending with a powwow, is
indicative of Lug's journey away from and then back to community and connection. It is also
indicative of the emphasis and importance Northrup places on cycles throughout Walking
the
Rez Road. Cycles abound in the text, and those of the natural world are indicative of
connectedness and help to highlight this truth for the Anishinaabe. In "death two," Northrup
writes that "some trees tipped over / showing us the death part / of their life cycle" (42) and
thus remind the narrator of the intimate relationship between life and death. Understanding
that, the reader can understand the playful nature of the poem's title. "Two" is Minnesota
State Highway Two, and it is also "too," for life and death and chance are all connected in
the Anishinaabe worldview,5 and "to," as the poem tacitly pronounces death to
any
perspective which fails to see the necessary connection between life and death. The reader is
thus prepared for the poem "end of the beginning," in which Northrup writes that "Death is a
part of life" and "Everything happens in cycles" (68). Recognizing this leads not to paralysis
or isolation, but to moral and social awareness and responsibility; the narrator asks "Is there
a message here?" and answers "Yah, / treat others like this / is your last day above ground"
(42). Northrup returns to natural cycles and reenforces the connection between them and the
cyclical traditional lifeways of the Anishinaabe in the final selection of the volume, whose
title, "Rez to Jep to Rez," succinctly phrases the cycle the story tracks. Luke Warmwater and
his wife Paneqwe return home after traveling to California and auditioning for a spot on
"Jeopardy" in order to finish the already gathered wild rice while birch and popple leaves are
falling and "Another yearly cycle was ending" (175).
Cycles are not confined to the natural
world and the traditional lifeways of the
Anishinaabe, however. They are a part of all life in general and Luke Warmwater's life in
particular. In "Bloody Money," a story about being so broke that one is forced to sell blood
plasma, Luke thinks about buying food with the money he'll get for his blood; he recognizes
that "This completed the cycle somehow" (45). Fortune frowns and then smiles after he
finishes the process of giving blood: Luke first gets a traffic ticket, he'd "been hooked up to
corporate America too long" (46), and then receives both an insurance check for a barely
remembered accident from several years ago and two hundred dollars owed him by his
brother-in-law. His $1,906.00 profit is "not bad for one day," but he knows better than to
think that his luck has turned for good. Rather the story closes with Luke "wonder[ing] how
long the prosperity part of the cycle would last" (46). Two stories later Luke is once again
out of work and short of cash and we are reminded that "these things worked in cycles"
(55).
{32}
Just as the story "Bloody Money"
enables the reader to see the relationship between
cycles and the traditional Anishinaabe worldview, stories within "Bloody Money" enable
Luke and his cousin to divert their attention from both a dehumanizing and impersonal
documentation procedure reminiscent of a "jail booking" and the bloodletting done in a large
"barnlike" room where there are "green vinyl beds" instead of "cow stanchions" and the
workers treat donors like "some kind of livestock" (44). Throughout Walking the Rez
Road
the characters tell stories to reestablish and accentuate connection; as often as not, those
stories elicit laughter. Luke, Dunkin Black Kettle, and Tom Skin tell stories and laugh
together while on a one-day job; Luke and Butch Storyteller "laughed and lied" (64) and told
stories on their way to a convention in Minneapolis. Judy can see Lug's "laugh lines as he
talked about the month with other vets" (33) at the VA hospital. Luke and Dolly, his ricing
partner in "Ricing Again," join "in on the laughing and exaggerating as people told stories
about what happened on the lake that day" (96). Luke and his wife Paneqwe laugh together
over the various stories centering on Luke's first cousin Ben Looking Back.
The move from stories and laughter to
humor is easily made, and it is humor that serves
as perhaps the most effective survival strategy for Native Americans in general and the
Anishinaabe in particular. The humorist's project is, as Neil Schmitz argues, "to confront
reality, to think, real is only" (4). Reality is frequently painful, of course, so humor
"transforms the effect of error, the result of wrong, and reformulates pain as pleasure" (9).
One would be hard-pressed to find a group of people in America for whom reality has been
and is more painful than it has been and is for Native Americans. Rather than despairing,
however, the first people frequently turn to laughter and humor. Vine Deloria pointed this
out early on: "When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects
of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that that
people can survive" (167). Kenneth Lincoln's thoughtful work on "Indi'n humor" reiterates
the relationship between humor and Native survival: "As expressed by survivors of tragedy,
nonvanishing Native Americans, this humor transcends the void, questions fatalism, and
outlasts suffering" (45). Consequently, humor is "their psychic wealth and long-term
salvation" (46).
Closer to home, Gerald Vizenor
emphasizes the importance of humor throughout his
work. In a recent interview he remarked at length upon the nature of humor and its role in
Native American literature and life--past, present, future:
Another kind of comedy is fairly well-established stories that intend to be tricky and comical and those are trickster stories which involve transformations of all kinds. And that can be very humorous just in itself, different kinds of transformations. {33} I argue that humor is natural, and it's healing. And it also brings people together. They trust each other more. And it's healing. And you have to know each other really well to laugh. So it's bonding in a sense too. But it's particularly healing and it's that part that I focus on. . . . And people expect a kind of liberation of humor from the mind. Playing the word "liberation" in its non-political sense, just that it's enriching and expanding, liberating. (Miller 80)
Humor, then, emphasizes and reenforces connection and community even as it transforms
and liberates teller and audience. Therefore, it is both a tool of survivance and an instrument
for change. Vizenor also indicates how the traditional lifeways and contemporary situation of
the Anishinaabe necessitate the use of humor. The same can be said for Northrup and
Walking the Rez Road. For it is when the cycle of life is canted toward trial,
misfortune, and
difficulty in the text that Northrup and his characters use humor to bring to light and make
light of the most painful aspects of contemporary Native life in order that they might
survive.
Returning to "Bloody Money" helps
us begin to understand the role humor plays in the
text. The Federal Government used and uses blood to determine the identity of those it has
historically defined as other. Such a determination runs contrary to the ways of the
Anishinaabe, at least in part, for in their worldview identity is determined first and foremost
by clan membership. Blood tells, however, according to the Government and the majority
culture, and it was one's blood that first resulted in removal to one of the reservations
established in Minnesota for the Chippewa, and then led to timber and land fraud stemming
from "illegally obtained Chippewa half-blood scrip" (Danziger 103).
"Bloody Money" also makes clear
that
blood and identity are bound up in an economic
system in which the commodification of the former works to determine the latter. Identity
transcends race in such a system, as those selling blood plasma are lumped together and can
be identified simply as "have-nots": "They all looked like people who needed ten dollars.
That was the common thread running through them. There were hippies, winos, Indians,
street people, college students, blacks, and some who defied a label" (44).
Luke Warmwater is one of the
disenfranchised, the dispossessed, but, as "Bloody
Money" indicates early on, "he was broke, not poor" (44). Both Warmwater and Northrup
have the "psychic wealth" of humor, a humor in this case neither as outrageous and shocking
as Vizenor's nor as playfully postmodern as Gordon Henry, Jr.'s is at times. Northrup uses
the narrative to spend some of his wealth of humor in order that we see the pain even as
{34} it is transformed so that the cause of the pain, the
reality of Native life in contemporary
America, can be survived. Faced with the need to get money, left with the disturbing option
of selling his blood, Luke first wonders where he can go to sell and how much he can get for
his spit or ear wax or sperm. Nowhere and nothing, but the lines are worth at least a smile as
they direct our attention to Luke's experience in the Blood Donor Center. We learn that it is
called Dr. Dracula's Bank by those forced to go there and that the workers are called
vampires. Such phrasing constitutes a complex act of transformation. The joke confers
identity upon both place and workers, and in so doing turns the tables on a situation in
which, typically, the donors are the ones being identified. Furthermore, the phrase "Dracula's
Bank" illuminates how the process of selling blood plasma turns one into the living dead,
precisely because such a commodification and economic identification of self is deadly.
Adding the title "Dr." to Dracula accentuates the painful reality of a profession dedicated to
helping and healing others having been transformed into that which here does neither. Finally,
the workers are vampires because the process turns them into the living dead as well.
Humor is also employed to confront
and transform stereotypic identifications. In "The
Jail Trail," for instance, Northrup lets us know that Natives turn to humor in response to the
stereotype of the drunken Indian. Luke Warmwater's treatment for alcohol abuse is
prefigured by the inclusion of "a story going around that the state hospital was going to
rename one wing of their facility. They were going to rename it for one of Luke's uncles
because he had been there so many times" (86). The story appears to substantiate the
prevailing stereotype: Indians are nothing more than a bunch of alcoholics whose substance
abuse and concomitant shiftlessness create a wasteful drain on the state's resources--with no
return on the investment. The story also looks squarely at reality: the majority culture is more
willing to spend money on a consequence of the problem of the Native American's place in
contemporary America than it is willing to address the problem itself. The story of the story,
Luke's reading of it as it were, makes the turn to humor, for the Sawyer Indi'ns and for us,
and transforms the pain while exploding the stereotype: "Luke thought the story was slightly
exaggerated because he had another uncle who had been there just as many times. They were
not going to name anything for him. The story was good for a chuckle though" (86).
With that chuckle echoing, we move
with Luke Warmwater through the "door of the
treatment place" in the next paragraph and into treatment, humorously prepared for the
humor necessary to survive the place. The narrative does not disappoint. It first humorously
transforms the majority culture's predilection not to see Natives as individuals by turning the
tables on the center's confidentiality rule in order to protect the identity of the skin {35} with
Warmwater at the center. It then casts the dispossessed, alienated status of the first people in
the United States of America in a humorous light by having both Luke and the nameless skin
place "their hands over their livers as they raised the flag" (88).
The Native's status as marginalized
other in their own land is reiterated in "brown and
white peek." Once again the response is humorous. Northrup writes one of the painful
questions at the core of reservation life: "The word reservation is a misnomer / reserved for
who?" (104). Who indeed. William Warren's History of the Ojibway People
indicates that
Anishinaabe have been at Fond du Lac from the seventeenth century onward. It was and is
their home. Reservation is an identity conferred upon the place by the majority culture. In his
introduction to Touchwood, a 1987 collection of Anishinaabe prose, Vizenor notes
that
Northrup's "direct and humorous stories are inspired by the rich language that people speak
on the reservation" (vii), and "The word reservation is a misnomer" (emphasis
added)
fittingly places the stress on that rich language. Northrup then offers the reader two different,
humorous, words for reservations in general and the Fond du Lac reservation in particular:
"rez" and "Fonjalack." The former is the typical Native name for reservations; the latter is a
phonetic Native phrasing for Fond du Lac. With each word speech, particularly Native
speech, is being emphasized, and such an emphasis is one of the hallmarks of humor: "In
effect, humorists must wrest their writing from proper writing, and this they do in a style that
enhances speech values and sets those values against the prescriptive values of writing"
(Schmitz 27). Northrup uses both "misspelled" signs in a line disclosing a painful truth of the
Fond du lac reservation: "The white man owns 80 percent of my rez, Fonjalack" (104). His
turn to humor makes perfect sense, of course, both because the traditional culture of the
Anishinaabe was and is predicated on the oral tradition and because the act of coopting the
word, transforming it, and making it his own enables him to address the painful issue, laugh,
and survive. Using the rich language spoken on the reservation, then, highlights how, with
language, Northrup and others have found "something good / in something grim" (104).
The relationship between language,
alienation, and humor is also articulated later in the
poem when the narrator tells us that the Rice Crispies "commods" are packaged in boxes and
cans with the labels, advertisements, and instructions in Spanish. The commodities originally
packaged for foreign consumption establish a connection between Natives and the peoples of
Central and South America that brings to light the at best dubious citizenry given the first
peoples by the Federal Government. The narrative makes light of the connection by declaring
that the "commods" offer food in addition to the free "Spanish lesson printed on every box
and can" (105); {36} here too, Northrup finds
"something good in something grim" with the joke.
Vizenor states that "The wild and
wondrous characters in his [Northrup's] stories are
survivors in the best trickster humor, no one is a passive victim" (Touchwood vii);
this is
especially true of Ben Looking Back in "Looking with Ben." In fact, nowhere in Walking
the
Rez Road is the use of humor as a survival strategy more necessary than in this short
story.
Looking Back's experiences in
Washington DC, the nation's capital and home of the
National Football League Redskins, indicate the degree to which Natives and Native cultures
have been collected and documented without being understood. Looking Back had read
about the collection of American Indian remains held by the Smithsonian and figures that
"Since they collect Indians, I decided to collect Smithsonians" (158). He gives Luke
Warmwater a present from Washington, a piece chipped from a Smithsonian museum, and
says that if each Native who goes to Washington collects a piece of the building then "we can
build our own Smithsonian, right here on the rez" (158).
Tourists are too often no better than
the worst museums; they, too, wish to collect
Indians. Ben tells Luke that tourists on the Mall asked if they could take Ben's picture. After
posing at no charge for the first dozen pictures, he starts charging five dollars per shot and
makes more than two hundred dollars in slightly over an hour. When asked his tribe, Ben
tells some that he is a Chippewa, others that he is a Sioux, and still others that he is a
Comanche. Then, in this scene illuminating the majority culture's tendency to preserve the
Native as an artifact and/or turn him into a tourist attraction, Northrup turns to humor. Ben
says that toward the end of the photo session "I was telling them I was half Chippewa, half
Ojibway, and the rest Anishinaabe. Some of the tourists were writing the stuff down as I
talked. I had a good time with the tourists" (159). What can one do when it is clear you are
not being heard, are not understood? How do you respond when people thoughtlessly take in
that you are half one tribe, half another, and the rest (the rest?) a third tribe? What
recourse
do you have when they write down without question that you are Chippewa (the Federal
Government's official designation for the Anishinaabe), Ojibway (the English approximation
of the name given the Anishinaabe by neighboring tribes), and Anishinaabe? Ignorance may
be bliss for the tourists, and for the majority culture as a whole, but how best to survive the
ignorance of a culture that has identified you without attempting to understand you? You
make a joke, find the humor, laugh in order to survive.
Pain and humor reach their peak when
Ben Looking Back goes inside the Smithsonian
and discovers the displays and dioramas of Indian history and material culture. Finding an
empty diorama, Looking Back makes a "Contemporary Chippewa" sign for the space, props
it up, steps over the {37} rope separating the audience
from the exhibit space, and strikes a
pose. The various responses are telling: some of the museum goers stop and examine the
diorama, some give strange looks as they try to make sense of the incredibly lifelike exhibit,
some do not even see Ben, and one woman takes a picture. At that moment, Ben breaks the
pose, asks for five dollars, and then steps back over the rope to leave the museum before a
guard comes.
The setting and the responses to the
Contemporary Chippewa exhibit disclose the
painful reality of how most see Natives in America, if they look at them at all. Ben's decision
to become an object of the gaze of the majority culture by crossing the boundary and creating
the exhibit is his, and Jim Northrup's, way of transforming this painful reality into something
pleasurable. He looks back at the tourists, as does Northrup, in good humor; indeed, Ben
tells Luke that he "had the most fun" (159) in the museum. The painful reality is accentuated
when Looking Back leaves the Contemporary Chippewa sign in place to designate the space
he has left. Ben tells Luke that "As I was walking away, I saw more tourists reading the sign
and looking at the empty space" (160). Earlier, in "brown and white peek," Northrup writes
that "We have TV, that window to America / we see you, you don't see us" (104). Given this
painful truth, it is perfectly fitting that the Contemporary Chippewa exhibit is, finally, empty.
The majority culture's appropriation and identification has historically been a
misappropriation and misidentification. It is equally fitting that by the time Ben Looking
Back finishes the story "Luke was laughing so hard he had to pull the car over on the side of
the road. After he settled down and wiped his eyes, he was ready to continue the ride home
to the rez" (160).
Luke Warmwater's tears of laughter
born of humor make it possible to continue.
Anishinaabe know this truth. Louise Erdrich has spoken of humor as "one of the most
important parts of American Indian life and literature . . . and when it's survival humor, you
learn to laugh at things" (qtd. in Coletti 46). Of her own people Erdrich has said that they
"have the best sense of humor of any group of people I've ever known" (qtd. in George 242).
In Laura Coltelli's volume of interviews with Native writers, Vizenor returns again and again
to humor: "You pick the moment, the second, and you want the world to change with you,
and it isn't going to do it. In fact it's going to say to you 'Too bad. Stay a victim'" and is when
you turn to humor "as an act of survival, humor as balance, and play as imagination" (168).
Bonnie Wallace, Anishinaabe writer and educator, said "We are humble people, sometimes,
but what saves us is our humor. . . . We hit bottom, laugh, and go on" (qtd. in
Crossbloods
32). That is, to close with the words of Jim Northrup, "you can't hold a good story down"
(87), because those good stories, told in all good humor, are what enable Northrup's
characters in Walking the Rez Road, Northrup himself, and--ultimately--the
Anishi-{38}naabe to survive. At the same time, they
liberate characters, author, readers, and Natives
from stereotypes and misunderstandings so that a healing change can occur.
NOTES
1"Surviva nce" is Vizenor's term to capture the nuances of Native American survival. For instance, in "Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus" he argues that "Ishi is the representation of survivance" (226) in no small measure because it is a nickname. As such, it harkens to and highlights the importance of oral tradition, community and communal stories, and memory and remembrance.
2See Edmund Danziger, esp. 91-134, for the standard historical perspective on this issue. See Ignatia Broker for the issue from an Anishinaabe perspective.
3This is also true of much contemporary Anishinaabe poetry and fiction. Vizenor's haiku and his thinking about that form highlight a text's capacity for resonance and the importance of audience and imagination. His prose, particularly at the level of the paragraph, is similarly crafted to necessitate audience engagement. Also, Blaeser writes, "I think the best poems might be nothing more than a list of names of people, animals, places, plants, sounds, seasons, because poetry is connections and these are the connections--the poetry--we all carry in our soul, the poetry that writers try to bring to the surface" (xi).
4Even those familiar with the traditional lifeways of the Anishinaabe of northern Minnesota might imagine that the last note sounded in "shrinking away" is in keeping with the philosophy implicit in the isolation families endured each winter in order to survive. The length and severity of the northern Minnesota winter, coupled with the small amount of readily available game, prohibited the Anishinaabe from maintaining their small summer villages once the weather began to turn; rather, families left the summer encampments and settled by themselves in the strong woods in order to weather the winter. While the families were by necessity self-reliant for much of the year, due to the impossibility of maintaining a village community, individual family members had to rely on each other for survival.
5The Anishinaabe creation story that opens Basil Johnston's Ojibway Heritage speaks of Kitche Manitou having a vision of the earth and universe in which he sees birth, growth, and death; chance and constancy. In a completely different context, that of issuing a call for environmental activism, Winona LaDuke emphasizes the importance of cyclical thinking to sustainable communities modeled after those of the Anishinaabeg (see "A Society Based on Conquest Cannot Be Sustained"). Also, Vizenor has been interested in the relationship between life, death, and chance. See Summer in the Spring, his interpretation of traditional Anishinaabe dream songs, lyric songs, and trickster tales, especially "Naanabozho and his Father" and "Naanabozho and the Gambler," for his articulation of the relationship. One should also turn to {39} Vizenor's novel The Heirs of Columbus, which concludes with a moccasin game between the protagonist Stone Columbus and the wiindigoo in which life or death is at stake.
WORKS CITED
Blaeser, Kimberly. Trailing You. Greenfield Center NY: Greenfield Review P, 1994.
Broker, Ignatia. Night Flying Woman. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1983.
Coltelli, Laura, ed. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
Copway, George. The Ojibway Conquest. New York: Putnam, 1850.
Danziger, Edmund. The Chippewas of Lake Superior. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990.
Deloria, Vine. Custer Died for Your Sins. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969.
George, Jan. "Interview with Louise Erdrich." North Dakota Quarterly 53 (Spring 1985): 240-46.
Ghezzi, Ridie Wilson. "Nanabush Stories from the Ojibwe." Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America. Ed. Brian Swann. New York: Vintage, 1996.
Henry, Gordon, Jr. The Light People. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1994.
Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
LaDuke, Winona. "A Society Based on Conquest Cannot be Sustained." Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice. Ed. Richard Hofrichter. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993. 98-106.
---. "Introduction." Walleye Warriors: An Effective Alliance Against Racism and for the Earth. Rick Whaley and Walter Bresette. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993.
Lincoln, Kenneth. Indi'n Humor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Miller, Dallas. "Mythic Rage and Laughter: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor." Studies in American Indian Literatures 7.1 (Spring 1995): 77-96.
Northrup, Jim. Walking the Rez Road. Stillwater MN: Voyageur, 1993.
Schmitz, Neil. Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Vizenor, Gerald. Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.
---. The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover NH: Wesleyan UP, 1991.
---. "Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus." Boundary 2 19.3 (1992): 223-35.
{40}
---. The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
---. Summer in the Spring New Edition. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1993.
---, ed. Touchwood: A Collection of Ojibway Prose. Minneapolis: New Rivers, 1987.
---. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1978.
Warren, William. History of the Ojibway People. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1984.
{41}
Irony and the "Balance of Nature on the Ridges" in Mathews's Talking to the Moon
Lee Schweninger
When he returns to live at the
blackjacks in Osage County, Oklahoma in 1929, John
Joseph Mathews (c. 1894-1979) brings with him a maxim (chiseled in stone), which he
assembles in his new home as the mantle piece: "to hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh--that is to
live" (194). Although he does not share that motto with the reader until late in the account of
his ten years on the ridges, its Westernness informs the entire book. The words, translated
from Latin, reflect a Western sentiment.1 As Mathews tells the reader, he found
the pieces of
the mantle at the ruins of a Roman "officers' club" in North Africa (194). The soldiers were
protecting Rome's imperialistic interests from the native Africans. Thus, much like the
Romans in Africa or the Europeans in the Americas, the author of Talking to the
Moon
recounts how he invades, settles, and justifies protecting his new homeland from enemies.
Characterized as a settler, Mathews,
the subject of the autobiography, becomes an
ironic embodiment of the progress of "civilization" across America and onto the land of the
Osage. According to recent theory of autobiography, one can establish that there is a
distance, a separation of identities, between the narrator and his subject (the author himself).
Not even the best intentioned autobiographer can recreate the subject as it was; rather he
must construct the subject (th