2016-17
JOHN NEAR GRANT Recipient
“Sunrise, Sunrise”: Repurposing the Native American Oral Tradition in the Literature of the Activist 1970s
Andrew Rule, Class of 2017
“Sunrise, Sunrise”: Repurposing the Native American Oral Tradition in the Literature of the Activist 1970s
Andrew Rule
2017 John Near Scholar
Mentors: Mr. Mark Janda, Mr. Nicholas Manjoine, Mrs. Lauri Vaughan April 12, 2017
“The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says. The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way. Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.”
Simon J. Ortiz, A Good Journey1
“He repeated the words as he remembered them, not sure if they were the right ones, but feeling they were right, feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together the last stars, the mountaintops, the clouds, and the winds celebrating this coming. The power of each day spilled over the hills in great silence. Sunrise.”
LeslieMarmon Silko, Ceremony2
1 Simon J. Ortiz, A Good Journey (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1977), 18.
2 Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Contemporary American Fiction (New York, NY: Viking Penguin Inc., 1977; New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1988), 169.
By 1968, the cumulative weight of centuries of political and cultural repression forced tribal communities across the forty-eight contiguous United States to contend with the central issue of this period in Native American history: the preservation of ancient traditions in the face of modernity. Each of these tribes had a distinct history, literary heritage, and grievance with the federal government, but all put a common emphasis on the oral tradition, the vast body of oral tales and performances that defined Native American literature until the middle of the twentieth century. Between the years 1968 and 1978, the disparate tribal communities of indigenous America responded to the threats facing their cultural sovereignty by converging into two nationwide movements, one combatting the policies of the United States through activism, the other protecting the oral tradition through art.
Historian Kenneth Lincoln has termed the artistic side of this equation the “Native American Renaissance.”3 The movement began with the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel House Made of Dawn in 1968. However, two key works from the latter half of the decade Simon J. Ortiz’s poetry collection Going for the Rain (1977) and
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1976) provide the most complete portrait of the Renaissance’s attempts to reconcile an ancient literary tradition with the artistic and cultural landscape of the modern world. The divergence of the literary community from the political philosophy laid out in Vine Deloria, Jr.’s seminal essay collection Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) reveals the diverse and sometimes conflicting approaches activists and artists from this period took to cultural preservation.
In stark contrast with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and affiliated organizations, which tended toward separatist and even overtly militant efforts toward cultural sovereignty, the
3 Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 8
work of Silko, Ortiz, and other Native American writers blended traditional and contemporary literary forms to advocate a melding of indigenous and colonial cultures rather than a rigid divide between the two. Their efforts must be understood in the context of the diverse threats Native Americans perceived to their traditions in 1968, from historical attempts by the United States government to suppress indigenous cultures to the ongoing lack of tribal representation in politics and academia. In light of these threats, the primary innovation of the Native American Renaissance was to repurpose oral storytelling for the textual medium, allowing the participatory and evolutionary aspects of precolonial literature to cross over into the modern day. The enduring significance of the movement lies in its application of this new literary form to the cultural and political challenges of the 1970s. With their hybrid literature, Native American writers, concerned for the fate of their tribal cultures in the contemporary world, proposed an alternative to activism: they created poems and novels that incorporated tradition and modernity alike, setting indigenous literature on a new path without fundamentally changing the oral tradition at its root.
Political and Social Challenges Facing Tribal Communities by 1968
It is I who die bearing cracked turquoise & making noise so as to protect your fragile immortality, O medicine ones.
Wendy Rose, “Vanishing Point: Urban Indian”4
From a modern viewpoint, the simultaneous literary and activist movements that swept Native American tribal communities between 1968 and 1978 were clearly unaligned in their
4 Wendy Rose, Bone Dance: New and Selected Poems, 1965 -1993, Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series 27 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 10.
strategies and philosophies. But figures as disparate as Russell Means, founder of the sometimesmilitant American Indian Movement, and Leslie Marmon Silko, author of the classic novel Ceremony, all operated in pursuit of the same ultimate goal: the preservation of Native American cultures in the face of external political and social threats. The diversity of these challenges some arising from federal policies, others from demographic change, still others from the long history against the native populations of the United States explain the equally varied responses of tribal communities determined to protect their heritages in the modern world.5
Centuries of white interference with and repression of tribal cultures contributed to a growing sense by the 1970s that the Native American people were under siege. One of the most strident and influential voices attributing the modern disintegration of native cultural and tribal identities to historical repression belonged to Vine Deloria, Jr., a Sioux tribal administrator and organizer with a history of political advocacy on behalf of Native Americans of all tribes.6 With its forceful indictments of the federal government’s approach to so-called “Indian affairs” and its unflinching accounts of grievances suffered by native peoples since 1776, Deloria’s book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, published in 1969, signaled a new wave of Native American activism and resistance.7 The book’s release followed years of highly visible black activism, both militant and nonviolent. As Deloria argues in an essay entitled “The Red and the Black,” however, the two movements were rooted in opposite experiences with cultural repression in America: “The white man forbade the black to enter his own social and economic
5 Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (London: Macmillan Company, 1969), 2
6 Ibid., 27.
7 Ibid., 31.
system and at the same time force-fed the Indian what he was denying the black.”8 In essence, the missions of the movements were fundamentally different because African-Americans were battling a long history of exclusion from and vicious subjugation by white society, while Native Americans contended with their own painful legacies of violence, persecution, and forced integration in that same society. At Deloria’s time of writing, many tribal communities were still struggling to confront the damage done by federal boarding schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where indigenous students were compelled to spend years under punishing policies of cultural suppression with the ultimate goal of forcible assimilation into white America.9 Simon J. Ortiz, a member of the Acoma Pueblo tribe and one of the period’s most important poets, remembers his parents’ suffering under the boarding school system as a “severe and traumatic form of brainwashing.”10 While the system had been dismantled by the 1970s, it still loomed as a symbol of the United States’ cultural interference in the collective memory of Native America.11
Two disturbing patterns in the generations leading up to the 1970s contributed heavily to fears of a breakdown in traditional tribal identity, concerns that in turn sped the rise of Native American activism and literature. The first was the spread of the scourge of alcohol.12 On the reservation, where alcoholism was more prevalent by this period than in any other population in America, alcohol was a major factor of what the literary historian Allan Chavkin has called “the 8 Ibid., 172.
9 Lincoln, Native American, 21.
10 Simon J. Ortiz, Woven Stone, Sun Tracks 21 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 8.
11 Louise Erdrich, interview by Steven Winn, City Arts and Lectures, National Public Radio, June 21, 2016, hosted by Linda Hunt.
12 Lincoln, Native American, 20.
most destructive disease the Native Americans suffered as a consequence of European arrival on European shores . . . despair.”13 From Simon Ortiz to Russell Means to Abel, the protagonist of N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 novel House Made of Dawn, many of the most influential Native Americans of the 1970s struggled mightily to overcome alcoholism early in life.14 Much of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony reads as an exploration and eventual subversion of the stereotype of the drunken Native American.
The second pattern feeding the perceived dissolution of tribal identity was the growing proportion of the indigenous population that chose to leave the reservation for the city, creating a class of what Deloria calls “urban Indians” cut off from the traditions and histories of their homelands.15 Wendy Rose, a Hopi poet who was raised off the reservation, ruefully recalled the implications of her “urban Indian” identity in a 1983 interview: I have not been exposed to oral traditions and this has been a big gap in my upbringing. It’s like growing up with bad eyesight and being given glasses as an adult. You missed a lot and you’re aware of it, and this has something to do with how you interpret the new, sharp world around you, but you can never go back and re-grow your life with good eyes. 16
13 Allan Chavkin, introduction to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: A Casebook, Casebooks in Criticism 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5.
14 Russell Means and Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 179
15 Deloria, Custer Died, 262.
16 Wendy Rose, "A MELUS Interview: Wendy Rose," by Carol Hunter, MELUS 10, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 77.
The cultural remove that Rose laments here was a direct result of her geographic separation from the tribal lands of the Hopi.17 Retention of tribal homelands was so central to the cultural preservation sought by activists in the 1970s that it informed nearly every action AIM took in its first decade of existence.
To AIM, especially after the Oglala Sioux activist Russell Means took over the organization in 1970, cultural preservation entailed vigorous protection of ancestral lands from the federal government by way of demonstrations, land seizures, and sometimes violent standoffs.18 Although he was not formally affiliated with AIM, Vine Deloria identified the key historical legacy that propelled the movement’s distrust of federal land management: the mountain of treaties, more than three hundred strong, that the United States had broken in its two centuries of dealing with Native American tribes.19 Custer Died for Your Sins identifies the ceaseless erosion of lands under tribal control as a direct result of the United States’ illegal actions and ruptured agreements.20 In the mid-twentieth century, tribal autonomy suffered further with the advent of termination, a cynical Congressional tactic meant to free the government of the monetary burden of providing basic services like education and health care to reservations.21
Termination riders, amendments to official negotiations with tribal leaderships that threatened to cut funding to reservations if the terms of the agreement were not accepted, were used regularly
17 Rose, Bone Dance, xii.
18 Means and Wolf, Where White, 173.
19 Lincoln, Native American, 16.
20 Deloria, Custer Died, 31.
21 Ortiz, Woven Stone, 15.
by the 1950s as a form of legislative extortion.22 Combined with relocation programs, which moved inhabitants of reservations to cities around the country in order to clear tribal lands, termination and the shameful history of broken treaties led many Native American activists to reject federal control of tribal territories entirely.23 Wendy Rose, a member of AIM long before she became a published poet, shared this sense of betrayal by the government in her youth: “I began to identify so thoroughly and personally with whoever was facing injustice in Indian country, that I felt . . . Termination invalidate my identity, and two-hundred-year-old treaties break across my bones.”24 Disaffected Native Americans like Rose were attracted to Deloria’s vision of expanded cultural and political autonomy, and, in the decade following the foundation of AIM in 1968, they often attempted to put it into practice. The most famous land seizures conducted during this time, the nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz starting in 1969 and the capture and subsequent siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, were both framed as repossessions of land that had originally and lawfully belonged to Native Americans.25 A geographical connection to one’s ancestral history was so important to tribal identity that organizers and supporters of these events, Russell Means and Vine Deloria among them, considered cultural and often physical separation from the rest of the United States essential to preservation of tribal traditions a view that the Native American literary community rejected.26
22 Deloria, Custer Died, 74.
23 Ibid., 53.
24 Rose, Bone Dance, xiii.
25 Laura Waterman Wittstock and Elaine J. Salinas, "A Brief History of the American Indian Movement," American Indian Movement, accessed December 4, 2016.
26 Deloria, Custer Died, 27.
Champions of tribal literatures and cultures in academia often confronted the same challenges that activists faced in the political sphere: marginalization, delegitimization, and a long history of domination by white scholars.27 Anthropological interest in indigenous America had existed for centuries, and white ethnographers had published numerous volumes of stories translated from the oral tradition.28 But, as Deloria laments in a biting essay entitled “Anthropologists and Other Friends,” academic interest in Native American cultures generally failed to recognize the realities of life on the modern reservation, seeking instead to uncover or even to construct an artificial way of life based on outdated conceptions of tribal traditions.29
Racist attitudes and stereotypes confined control of the narrative to a class of white scholars, perched in universities often out of reach to those living on the reservation.30 The resulting skewed picture of tribal society threatened the emergence of a new style of Native American art; as the social critic Edward Carpenter warns, “We use media to destroy cultures, but first we use media to create a false record of what we are about to destroy.”31 In particular, tribal voices in literature were not judged on the same par as other traditions, with oral tales still conspicuously missing from college courses of study and novels by Native American authors still shelved under “Anthropology” rather than “Fiction.”32 Only by expanding university American Indian Studies programs, founding literary quarterlies, and promoting revisionist histories like Dee Brown’s
27 Rose, "A MELUS," interview, 73.
28 Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature , ed. Jennifer McClinton-Temple and Alan Velie, second ed. (New York, NY: Facts on File, 2013), s.v. “American Indian poetry.”
29 Deloria, Custer Died, 80.
30 Ibid., 82.
31 Edmund Carpenter, Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 99, quoted in Lincoln, Native American, 282.
32 Rose, "A MELUS," interview, 71.
popular 1970 book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee did Native Americans begin to gain influence over portrayals of their tribal cultures in American society at large.33 In this way, the struggle for political rights spilled over into a battle for representation in academia a battle that would continue to be fought for decades, especially with regards to the place of oral tales on university literature curricula.34
Mobilizing against the perceived dissolution of tribal identity that many Native Americans feared would result from white political and cultural interference, members of AIM and of the other activist movements of the 1970s denounced, to varying degrees, the encroachment of postcolonial cultures on indigenous America. The prominent Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor combined their values and goals into a single quality he called “survivance”: “the political and ecstatic courage of resistance over the mundane themes of victimry.”35 The goals of individual activists who pursued this course of “resistance” ranged from the freedom to practice tribal traditions unmolested, the goal Deloria tended to prefer, to political autonomy from the federal government, which Russell Means sought throughout his career.
36 In spite of activists’ diverse visions for the future, the campaigns and protests of the 1970s drew enormous vitality from their shared opposition to the degradation of tribal culture.37 Their efforts proved correct the prediction Deloria had made in 1968: “Indians riding the crest of
33 Kenneth Lincoln, "Caliban, Again," The Kenyon Review, n.s., 9, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 106
34 Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist, Native American Literatures: An Introduction , Continuum Studies in Literary Genre 3 (New York, NY: Continuum, 2004), 2.
35 Joelle Rostkowski, Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans , Native Traces 3 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), xlvi.
36 Means and Wolf, Where White, 261.
37 Deloria, Custer Died, 262.
tribal and nationalistic waves will be able to accomplish a great many things previously thought impossible by Indian and non-Indian alike.”38 But activism was not the only possible response to political and cultural repression. From 1968 onward, Native American writers turned to their roots in the oral tradition to advocate a new response to these modern threats, one that enfolded white America with Native America, the present with the past.
The Oral Origins of the Literature of the Native American Renaissance
“Whenever people are driving along and stop to offer Yuusthiwa a ride, he refuses and says, ‘I still have my legs,’ ” my father says, saying it like the old man, a slow careful drawl. And my mother corrects him: “ ‘While I’m still able to walk.’ ”
Simon J. Ortiz, “Yuusthiwa”39
If the story of Yuusthiwa, the 114-year-old wanderer of the Acoma Reservation in New Mexico, had been committed to text in the classic European style, it would bear the hallmarks of most English-language poetry. Yuusthiwa’s travels would reach the reader via a distant and authoritative author, whose version of events could be reinterpreted but never supplanted; the vocabulary and cultural idioms would belong to a particular moment in history, in this case generations ago; and, most importantly, the tale would be bound permanently to the page. Simon Ortiz’s “Yuusthiwa,” like the other narrative poems in his 1976 collection Going for the Rain, may be as mired in text as any piece by Wordsworth or Rilke, but the scene it depicts a family storytelling session, a reprise of a tale heard many times before embodies the traits that have preserved oral traditions long after the introduction of textual literature into the New World.
38 Ibid., 241.
39 Simon J. Ortiz, Going for the Rain, Native American Publishing Program 7 (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1976), 101.
Freed from the constraints of the page, an oral tale allows its audience to participate in the telling of the story, just as the speaker’s mother interrupts his father in Ortiz’s poem.40 And, since the story varies based on its tellers and listeners, it is minutely altered every time it is recounted.41
As a result, the full history of the Yuusthiwa tale is discernible in its current form: its use of ancient terms of deference and salutation mark it as generations old, but, after the evolution of dozens or hundreds of tellings, the story now borrows modern slang and even refers to the old man’s favorite haunt by its English name, McCartys, rather than the traditional Dheetseyama.42 Ortiz’s poetic innovation is to render this fluid performance of oral literature in rigid text, to synthesize the indigenous and European modes of storytelling. His written collections strive for “the same participatory force and validity as words spoken and listened to.”43 This mission to preserve orality on the page unites all the members of the Native American Renaissance. The extent to which written literatures have diverged from their ancient oral roots has occupied scholars of indigenous culture ever since American Indian studies first became a widespread academic discipline in the mid-1970s, but similar questions had been applied to European traditions ever since the days of the pioneering literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin.44
Determined to track all literature back to it pretextual roots in oral expression, he introduced the concept of heteroglossia into the theoretic discourse.45 The term refers to written literature’s
40 Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 6.
41 Ibid., 64.
42 Simon J. Ortiz, Woven Stone, Sun Tracks 21 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 3
43 Ibid., 151
44 Rose, "A MELUS," interview, 74-75.
45 Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 4.
identity as a dialogue between the overlapping voices that underpin the work some supplied by the author, others by the reader. Viewed from this lens, a text is not a fossilized monologue from its author but rather a “record of discourse” that charts and combines many viewpoints.46 Like a less literal version of the collaborative storytelling in “Yuusthiwa,” the quality of heteroglossia turns literature into an invitation to bring new voices to the work and thereby form an entirely new dialogue.47
Whereas orality in a traditional European text generally takes considerable theoretic excavation to uncover, it often occupies a an obvious and essential place in the works of the Native American Renaissance. Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, a specialist in Native American literatures at Bradley University, identifies a fundamental difference between the heteroglossia of textual works and the participatory storytelling of traditional oral performances.48 These modes of storytelling are conversive, with the listener-reader invited literally to contribute to the formation of the tale.49 The migration of orative, or oral-style, literature onto the page that occurred in the 1970s therefore threatened to lock the stories into a discursive state, retaining the markings of oral performance but losing the “incantatory” quality of the original format.50 Brill de Ramírez’s argument applies neatly to “Yuusthiwa”: although the poem artfully depicts the participatory creation of an oral tale, it cannot regain the conversive state that would allow the listener-reader to collaborate in that creative process. Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, the chorus of
46 James Ruppert, "Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Contemporary Native American Fiction," Texas Studies in Language and Literature 28, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 218
47 Sarris, Keeping Slug, 185.
48 Brill de Ramírez, Contemporary American, 6.
49 Ibid.
50 Lincoln, Native American, 18.
voices, is readily apparent and yet beyond the audience’s control. The impossibility of the translator’s task to render “the power of the original oral performance [in] written modern English” only distances the textual product further from the spoken performance at its root, even if the translation is cultural rather than linguistic.51 Poetry like Ortiz’s is still orative in its harnessing of the collaborative force of oral performance, but its ability to channel the conversive power of the oral tradition is hampered by its textuality.
Just as the writing of the Native American Renaissance achieves a medium between the theoretical dialogism of most European literature and the literal dialogues of participatory oral performance, the works of Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others also approximate the fluidity and evolutionary capability of oral literature as best they can on the page. As the Pomo/Miwok novelist Greg Sarris has observed, the oral tradition is “not fixed, but an ongoing process.”52 Whether they concern Yuusthiwa, Coyote, or any of the other heroic and comic figures in the indigenous canon, oral tales are not anchored to a static written medium and therefore tend to evolve considerably over the generations.53 Historically, European scholars rejected the mutability of spoken literature, opting instead for the firmness and authority of the written word.54 What seems essential to one culture, however, might be fatal to another. The staggering diversity of Coyote tales in antique and modern tribal settings, for instance, relies heavily on the fluidity of oral performance: like a biological species, if kept free from the page, a single narrative can propagate, adapt to cultural changes, and even branch off into multiple distinct
51 Kenneth Lincoln, review of "In vain I tried to tell you": Essays in Native American Ethnopolitics , by Dell Hymes, MELUS 10, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 87.
52 Sarris, Keeping Slug, 180.
53 Brill de Ramírez, Contemporary American, 64.
54 Ibid.
tales.55 Beginning in the 1970s, professors in American universities’ newly-founded Native American studies programs began to contest the standard view that the impermanence of oral storytelling disqualified it from being serious literature, laying the grounds for the establishment of oral performance as a literary form just as worthy of critical analysis as textual works.56 The early poetry of Simon Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko, published in the midst of this academic debate, in many ways proved the legitimacy of fluid, orative literature. Although the textual nature of their poetry locked the writing in a static form, making further adaptation impossible, these authors prominently featured traditional oral tales that had undergone obvious evolutions since they were first told generations or centuries earlier. In “Toe’osh: A Laguna Coyote Story,” first published in her 1974 poetry collection Laguna Woman, Silko recounts a traditional myth that bears the markings of the modern day. As in the original oral tale, Coyote gambles his coat away, but in Silko’s version it is the modern game of poker that leaves him shivering in the cold.57 Similarly, in the poetry of Simon Ortiz, Coyote continues his centuriesold tradition of debauchery with a modern flair: “Probably get to Tulsa in a couple days, / drink a little wine, / tease with the Pawnee babes, / sleep by the Arkansas River...”58 The tale has evolved to fit the modern setting of Tulsa, Oklahoma, but at its core it is the same trickster story that has been told among the Pueblo from time immemorial.
55 Simon J. Ortiz, A Good Journey (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1977), 17-18.
56 Lawrence J. Evers, "Native American Oral Literatures in the College English Classroom: An Omaha Example," College English 36, no. 6 (February 1975): 650.
57 Leslie Silko, "Toe'osh: A Laguna Coyote Story," in Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans, by Kenneth Mark Rosen (New York: Arcade Pub., 1993), 14, previously published in Laguna Woman: Poems (Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review Press, 1974), accessed November 29, 2016.
58 Ortiz, A Good Journey, 17-18.
A subtler and more pervasive form of evolutionary storytelling in the fiction and poetry of the 1970s was linguistic melding, which nearly every writer of the Native American Renaissance incorporated into his or her work in some form. Almost invariably, the original oral versions of the tales these authors repurposed had been told in a language other than English. Ortiz’s “Yuusthiwa,” for instance, bears the linguistic remnants of its previous incarnation in the Acoma tongue, as when the legendary old man greets the speaker’s father with the words “Akhu Tsar-rrhlai kutha.”59 When Ortiz inserts Acoma phrases like this one wholesale into his otherwise English text, he captures the tale of Yuusthiwa at a moment of evolutionary transition between its original language and the increasingly inescapable tongue of American society off the reservation. The same process on a larger scale had led to the development of a dialectic English among many tribes by the 1970s, colloquially known as “Red English” a hybrid language to match the hybrid literature of the period.60 Luci Tapahonso, a Navajo poet and literary successor of Ortiz and Silko in the next phase of the Native American Renaissance, carried on their practice of linguistic melding by writing whole sections of her poetry in a complex, almost indecipherable blend of English and Navajo.61 Her collections, like theirs, consist of static textual pieces that stand testament to the dynamic linguistic and cultural evolution of the oral tradition.
The full impact of the oral literatures that Ortiz, Silko, and Tapahonso channel is best understood in the context of the central role that art plays in many Native American tribes. As Kenneth Lincoln observes of the diverse group of tribes whose members sparked the Native
59 Ortiz, Going for the Rain, 101.
60 Kenneth Lincoln, Indi'n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10
61 Ibid., 11.
American Renaissance, “Art is not at the decorative edges of Indian cultures, but alive at the functional heart: in blankets that warm bodies, potteries that store food, songs that gather power, stories that bond people, ceremonies that heal, disciplines that strengthen spirits.”62 By recounting ancestral stories in fiction and nurturing their natural evolutions in poetry, Native American writers of the 1970s preserved entire cultures in a very real way, since many tribal identities cannot be separated from their literatures, and vice versa. Simon Ortiz insists that oral stories are microcosms of their tribes of origin: “Oral tradition is inclusive; it is the actions, behavior, relationships, practices throughout the whole social, economic, spiritual life process of people.”63 Viewed in this light, thematic and stylistic aspects of oral stories, especially when consistent across diverse tribal literatures, take on greater cultural significance. Foremost among these shared building blocks of Native American literatures ancient and modern is humor.64 The role of comedy in the trickster tales of the American Southwest is one of the few aspects of the oral tradition that have worked its way into the popular American consciousness. In their modern incarnations, however, trickster figures like the ubiquitous Coyote tend to act out their antics in service to a larger political or social message, as in Silko’s poem “Toe’osh: A Laguna Coyote Story”: Charlie Coyote wanted to be governor and he said that when he got elected he would run the other men off the reservation
62 Lincoln, Native American, 12.
63 Ortiz, Woven Stone, 7.
64 Lincoln, Indi’n Humor, 5.
and keep all the women for himself.65
The sheer outrageousness of Silko’s trickster uses humor to mask the piece’s barbed commentary on greedy Bureau of Indian Affairs officials and reservation opportunists. In essence, at the same time that Russell Means was waging political war with the corrupt collaborationist Dick Wilson in the Sioux nation, Silko was fighting her side of the battle with subversive humor instead of inflammatory rhetoric.66 Even Vine Deloria acknowledged the potential power of this line of attack in his manifesto Custer Died for Your Sins, which devotes an entire chapter to the ways reservation jokes can be used as a weapon against repression.67 Less extravagantly, the speaker of Ortiz’s poem “Sometimes It’s Better to Laugh, Honest Injun” turns to humor to shake off the violent ramblings of a drunken weapons technician: I ask him, Why? then. His eyes turn cloudy, and he mumbles into his drink. He doesn’t know perhaps, and he doesn’t want to conspire with me anymore . . . I walk anyway into the concourse tunnel for Gate 11-B and decide to laugh my deep relief. And it’s all true.68
65 Silko, "Toe'osh: A Laguna," in Voices of the Rainbow , 15.
66 Means and Wolf, Where White, 305
67 Deloria, Custer Died, 167
68 Ortiz, Going for the Rain, 63-64.
With effort, the speaker comes out on top of the confrontation simply by maintaining his sense of humor in the face of the white man’s naked aggression. Kenneth Lincoln calls this nonweaponized variety of wit “Indi’n Humor,” and, in the face of the immense cultural and political pressures of the 1970s, it provided Native Americans of all tribes with a bulwark against the crushing tide of prejudice.69
Humor was never limited to a single indigenous culture, but the authors of the Native American Renaissance drew equally heavily from literary tropes more specific to their individual tribal backgrounds. Silko’s Ceremony, long recognized as one of the movement’s most technically complex novels, represents an especially subtle and sophisticated revival of the idioms of one particular oral literature.70 The author’s native Laguna culture ascribes sacred significance to certain colors and directions: blue, for instance, represents the west and the underworld, and yellow, the color of the north, carries overtones of the fertility figure Yellow Woman.71 In Ceremony, nearly every aspect of the protagonist Tayo’s journey from his pilgrimage north and west to the home of a Yellow Woman–like lover on Mount Taylor, to the blue eyes that metonymically represent the white invader and Tayo’s own mixed heritage is in dialogue with these pieces of Laguna mythology.72 Ceremony doubtless represents an effort to bring the oral tradition into the modern day, but it is also deeply rooted in an ancient, intricate lattice of literary tropes that few non-Laguna readers could comprehend unaided.
69 Lincoln, Indi’n Humor, 10.
70 Allan Chavkin, introduction to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: A Casebook, Casebooks in Criticism 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3
71 Lincoln, Native American, 245.
72 Ibid., 247.
In this regard, the novel is indicative of a more general tendency in the Native American Renaissance to use myth as a framework for modern stories, even when the relevant myths are not specifically referred to. This kind of mythological scaffolding can stretch across the entirety of a book-length work, as is the case with Ceremony and Going for the Rain, both of which follow the structure of the traditional Pueblo tale of the rain-seeker.73 Silko directly invokes the legend early in her novel, when her protagonist Tayo begs for an end to the plague of torrential rain and inadvertently blights his homeland with drought. A secondary oral-style narrative in verse, which follows Fly and Hummingbird as they quest to regain the rainclouds from a wicked gambler spirit, makes the parallels between the ancient and modern tales even more explicit. The debt that Going for the Rain owes to the rain-seeker myth is much more oblique, but the legend’s influence is visible in the book’s title and its occasional appeals to the shiwanna, or Pueblo rain spirits.74 At least among readers familiar with these mythologies, Silko’s and Ortiz’s creations derive a significant portion of their power from the contours of age-old stories that are still faintly visible beneath.75
Inescapable in Native American literatures ancient and modern is the idea that the spoken word has an innate, mystic power. More than oral literature’s potential for evolution, more even than its incorporation of humor and participatory storytelling, this belief in the potency of speech explains the continued relevance of the oral tradition to essentially all Native American cultures. For tribes ranging from the Great Lakes all the way to the American Southwest,
73 Lincoln, Native American, 235.
74 Ortiz, Going for the Rain, xiii-xiv.
75 Louis Owens, "'The Very Essence of Our Lives': Leslie Silko's Webs of Identity," in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: A Casebook, ed. Allan Chavkin, Casebooks in Criticism 8 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95, previously published in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 167-91.
storytelling is not just an act of creativity but also one of creation.76 Kenneth Lincoln recalls that, on the Great Plains of his youth, the Lakota imputed the voice with magical power; it is wakan, or “holy-mysterious,” and the stories that it imparts have the unique power to manipulate all animate life.77 To master the art of storytelling is to harness a potent “‘life-breath’ [through which] the world’s powers can be called, prayed, sung, chanted, ceremonialized, even reasoned with or admonished.”78 Among the Pueblo, meanwhile, one myth labels the whole of creation the visionary product of an ultimate artistic figure: Ts’its’tsi’nako, or “Thought-Woman,” who by telling the story of the universe brings it to life.79 In a literal sense, according to this myth, humankind inhabits “a world made of stories . . . a world alive, always changing and moving.”80 The author who manages to channel the power of the spoken word onto the page is a modern-day Ts’its’tsi’nako. Affirming the entire mission of the Native American Renaissance, the Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday says, “At the heart of he American Indian oral tradition is a deep belief in the efficacy of language. Now that we communicate through the written word and mostly in English, this belief remains as strong as ever. Language is sacred. The writer recreates the world in words.”81 The genius of Silko, Ortiz, and their literary peers lies in their successful transition, starting in the 1970s, of oral literature onto the printed page without divesting it of its powers of creation.
76 Erdrich, interview, City Arts
77 Lincoln, review of "In vain I tried to tell you": Essays in Native American Ethnopolitics , 86.
78 Ibid.
79 Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Contemporary American Fiction (New York, NY: Viking Penguin Inc., 1977; New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1988), 1
80 Ibid., 95.
81 Rostkowski, Conversations with, 5.
Literature and Cultural Mediation in the 1970s
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.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony82
A reader studying Ceremony today, forty years after its original publication, could be forgiven for forgetting that it was the product of the activist 1970s. Its most salient and innovative sections, like those describing the divine Thought-Woman or mimicking the ancient rain-seeker legend, are unbounded by historical time. Even Tayo’s post-traumatic flashbacks to the carnage of the War in the Pacific recede into the background as he penetrates deeper into the ceremonial landscape of the Laguna.83 But the historical moment that gave birth to Ceremony was the same one that prompted Vine Deloria to condemn Congressional termination in the strongest terms and that drove Russell Means to declare an independent Oglala nation at Wounded Knee. The all-important political and cultural challenges to Native American traditions that defined Indian affairs in the 1970s exist symbolically in Ceremony in the form of ck’o’yo, or witchery.84 The witches represent the tide of hate, the twisted disrespect for other cultures that spawned white dominance of native North America in the first place. True to form, Silko expresses this very modern prejudice in the ancient terms of storytelling: a disturbing sequence at the heart of her novel depicts a powerful witch as, like a dark Ts’its’tsi’nako, he spins a horrifying tale of a godless white horde that comes to life as he describes it.85 Underneath the
82 Silko, Ceremony, 2
83 Ibid., 15.
84 Ibid., 189.
85 Ibid., 128.
metaphor of witchery, there is no difference between the hatefulness that Silko identifies and the cultural and political oppression that the activists of AIM devoted their careers and lives to battling. The novelist, however, places special emphasis on simple belief: “To hate whites for their hatreds will destroy Indians.”86 Ceremony’s allegory of witchery is a cautionary tale against reactionary responses to cultural threats. If the witches manage to “make [people] fear growth,” forcing them to sequester their traditions from the influences of the world, choking their stories off from their natural processes of evolution, then the Native American people will be doomed.87
In this reading of Silko’s novel, the political thesis of the entire Native American Renaissance reveals itself: the way to cultural preservation is to integrate ancient traditions into the modern world, letting the stories the last line of defense against the onslaught of postcolonial American culture run their evolutionary course.
The key to enfolding Native American cultures and their oral traditions with the modern world that now surrounds them lies within the evolutionary, participatory nature of the stories themselves. Unlike in Bakhtin’s figurative textual dialogue, or heteroglossia, the orative literature of the Native American Renaissance has the power to bring multiple contradictory voices together as though they were literal storytellers in an oral performance.88 Whereas the precolonial conversive format traditionally swept stories along their evolutionary pathways by inviting audience members to collaborate in the creative process, indigenous written works of the 1970s were exposed to the far more varied voices of a modern body of listener-readers.89 Entire
86 Lincoln, Native American, 248.
87 Silko, Ceremony, 116.
88 Brill de Ramírez, Contemporary American, 6.
89 James Ruppert, "Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Contemporary Native American Fiction," Texas Studies in Language and Literature 28, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 210.
cultures were now the interlocutors in an enormous storytelling ceremony. Silko, Ortiz, and others channeled the oral tradition to create written novels and poems that encouraged the mixing of a multitude of voices, indigenous and non-indigenous alike. Crucially, this confluence of viewpoints allowed each community to see how the other side’s opinion had been formed, what circumstances had led to its formation, and what forces had repressed it.90 The cross-cultural dialogue in all works of the Native American Renaissance makes tribal society comprehensible to white America, and vice versa, in a process Processor James Ruppert of the University of Alaska Fairbanks terms “mediation ”91 Greg Sarris identifies this exchange as an essential component of native literatures: “The process is ongoing, an endeavor aimed not at a final transparent understanding of the Other or of the self, but at a continued communication, an everwidening understanding of both sides.”92 Cultural mediation, thanks in large part to its two-way nature, set the indigenous literary community on a radically different path from the activist proponents of cultural separation.
In reality, practitioners of mediation simply embraced a fact of Native American society that by the 1970s had become inescapable: that the non-indigenous world had left an indelible mark on tribal traditions. The cultures of Native America and the United States were inextricably intertwined, an entanglement most visibly expressed in the growing population of mixed-blood individuals on and off the reservation.93 The “breeds,” as they were called in reservation slang, straddled two cultures, “both animal and trickster, both white and tribal, the uncertain creators in
90 Sarris, Keeping Slug, 5.
91 Ruppert, “Mediation and Multiple,” 209.
92 Sarris, Keeping Slug, 6.
93 Lincoln, Native American, 15.
an urban metaphor based on a creation myth that preceded [them] in two world views and oral traditions.”94 The power of this modern metaphor in the modern world did not go unnoticed in the Native American Renaissance. Not only did authors Leslie Marmon Silko, Wendy Rose, and Greg Sarris each have a non-native parent, but some of the key fictional figures of the movement including Ceremony’s Tayo and a mysterious woman he meets early in the novel, the alluring, hazel-eyed Night Swan are also of mixed-blood descent.95 Advocates of cultural melding looked toward these people and their dual heritages as an ideal expression of mediation, a representation of the synthesized literature they hoped to create.96 Such a hybrid art form would widen both cultures’ horizons: “Once the distinctions that separate oral literature from written literature are banished, new fields of discourse increase the possibilities of mediation, of new insight, and of experiencing new worldviews.”97 As even Vine Deloria readily admits in Custer Died for Your Sins, Native American art created in the 1970s was a product of the intersecting influence of the author’s tribe, other tribal traditions, and white America, not of the pristine tribal culture imagined by white anthropologists.98 The emerging hybrid literature was an art form that responded directly to this changing cultural landscape.99
The concepts of homeland and of a nurturing, animate earth are so central to many Native American cultures that the literary figures of the 1970s, like their activist counterparts, made the
94 Gerald Vizenor, Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), xvii, quoted in Ruppert, "Mediation and Multiple,” 212-13.
95 Lincoln, Native American, 224.
96 Owens, "'The Very," in Leslie Marmon, 91.
97 James Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 37, quoted in Brill de Ramírez, Contemporary American, 65.
98 Deloria, Custer Died, 82.
99 Ruppert, "Mediation and Multiple," 210.
preservation of land a key tenet of their approach to cultural revitalization. As in many mythologies around the world, the earth in the oral tradition tends to serve as a powerful symbol of birth and creation; some Pueblo tribes even imagine a water-filled underground chamber, a sort of geologic womb, as the birthplace of the first humans.100 The Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan considers Native Americans inseparable from the landscape that sustained their ancestors for untold generations: “The red sky ends at our feet / and the earth begins at our heads.”101 In its power to nurture and endure, the earth resembles the human voice, another major symbol of creation common to many diverse Native American cultures. Simon Ortiz conflates the two in his poem “Wind and Glacier Voices,” which invests in the landscape the power to tell stories from eons ago, to prophecy the future of mankind, and to protest the present mistreatment of nature: “Please don’t tell me / how to live; / I’ve always lived this way,” the personified earth remonstrates the reader.102 Leslie Marmon Silko gives the earth an even more human presence in Ceremony: as her pilgrim Tayo delves deeper and deeper into the ancestral traditions of the Laguna people, at the center he finds Ts’eh Montaño, a mysterious, maternal manifestation of the land who completes his healing process.103
Given its symbolic importance, land in the Native American Renaissance is portrayed as an indispensable repository of cultural history, not as a resource to be harnessed for political ends. Wendy Rose, the Hopi poet who spent her entire childhood off the reservation, perfectly embodied the Renaissance’s approach when she moved onto her ancestral homeland to explore
100 Lincoln, Native American, 195.
101 Encyclopedia of American , s.v. "American Indian."
102 Ortiz, Going for the Rain, 78-79.
103 Lincoln, Native American, 245.
her heritage as an adult.104 Like in Ortiz’s “Wind and Glacier Voices,” the earth spoke to her, yielding up the voices of generations of long-dead Hopis.105 If the writers of the 1970s embraced this type of artistic and cultural connection to the land, they rejected any exploitative use of its resources that was likely to destroy it, hence Tayo’s visceral revulsion at the sight of a uranium mine built on reservation land in Ceremony: “Waves of heat caught him, and . . . only his memory of running and breathing kept him alive.”106 Ortiz uses his opposition to the despoilment of the nurturing earth to manufacture a horrible irony in the unpublished poem “Telling a Friend,” which chronicles his early work at a yellowcake mill, another product of the United States government’s uranium production campaign in the American Southwest during the 1950s and 1960s.107 But while Rose, Silko, and Ortiz opposed the federal government’s abuse of the earth, they did not necessarily support the motives of activists who tried to accrue land and expand tribal autonomy. Vine Deloria and Russell Means’s intention in advocating the cession of land to tribal control was to achieve a physical separation from the influence of non-indigenous America, a goal that ran counter to the Renaissance’s mission of cultural mediation.
Above all, these writers trusted in the enduring power of their traditions to help the stories survive, even in the changing world of the 1970s. Understandably, given that their goal was to beat back the threats that white America posed to their cultural sovereignty, activists tended to turn toward relatively recent events to provide historical backing for their efforts.108
104 Rose, Bone Dance, xii-xiii.
105 Ibid., xii.
106 Silko, Ceremony, 227.
107 Simon J. Ortiz, "Going for the Rain and A Good Journey," reading, February 26, 1975, audio file, University of Arizona Poetry Center Audio Video Library, accessed November 25, 2016.
108 Means and Wolf, Where White, 260.
Russel Means of AIM, for instance, selected Wounded Knee, South Dakota as the setting for his 1973 showdown with federal forces largely because the town was freighted with the legacy of the notorious massacre there a little over a century before.109 Even the solutions the activists proposed in this case, the restoration of the Treaty of Fort Laramie promising the Sioux a considerable tract of land around the Powder River were necessarily rooted in the recent past.110 By contrast, the literature produced around this time, despite its generally contemporary setting, is suffused with a sense of ancientness and permanence. Ortiz proudly declares in “The Significance of a Veteran’s Day” that “I am a veteran of at least 30,000 years,” and his pride in the inconceivably long history of indigenous peoples in the Americas suggests his confidence that tribal traditions can weather modernity as well.111 The name of his tribe and his homeland is Acoma, “the place that always was”; the implication is that it always will be.112 Silko invokes the same concept of eternity in Ceremony with the figure of Old Grandma, whose “time immemorial stories” anchor Tayo and his family to a chain of tradition that stretches back far into the mists of time.113
Strikingly, the writers of the Native American Renaissance dwell on this illustrious history as a way to justify their cultures’ inexorable march into the future. The dominant philosophy of the movement mixed a respect for past customs with a will to follow their
109 Ibid., 253.
110 Indian Peace Commission, Treaty of Fort Laramie, Treaty Doc. No. 40, 2d Sess. (1868).
111 Ortiz, Going for the Rain, 72.
112 Lincoln, Native American, 191.
113 Silko, Ceremony, 95.
examples in the present; as Ortiz proclaims, “Continuance is life itself.”114 To attempt to remain in the past to leave nothing to the realm of memory is to put stock in a fundamentalism that ignores the forward motion of time at its own peril. These two approaches, the past-oriented and the present-oriented, are most fully expressed in Ceremony, where Tayo’s symbolic illness serves as a stand-in for the cultural threats swarming Native American tribal communities. Silko’s embodiment of fundamentalism is Ku’oosh, an ancient, revered medicine man whose age-old charms and remedies fail to cure Tayo.115 When Silko introduces Betonie, a less reputed healer brought in only as a last resort, his identity as a denizen of the present is immediately clear: he is still young, not decrepit like Ku’oosh, and his floor is strewn with “layers of old calendars, the sequence of years confused and lost.”116 Whereas Ku’oosh taps into the past for mystic power, Betonie has unmoored himself from the passage of time, allowing the influences of the past and present to mix freely in his rituals. The modern medicine man is fluent in the ways of his tribe, but he is not mired in them, and it is only his blended traditional and contemporary remedies that chase away Tayo’s sickness. Silko and her peers envisioned a similar hybrid cure for their tribes’ symbolic illnesses, with literature as the medicine. They were creating an art rooted in but distinct from the oral tales that had come before: “Contemporary Indian literature is not so much new . . . as regenerate, transitional communities emerging from the old.”117 In short, the Native American Renaissance was the next step in the endless evolution of a literary tradition as old as indigenous America itself.
114 Ortiz, Woven Stone, 10.
115 Silko, Ceremony, 35.
116 Ibid., 111.
117 Lincoln, Native American, 97.
Wendy Rose is in a uniquely privileged position to observe the differences between fundamentalism and mediation, thanks to her past involvement in both the activist and literary communities.118 She recalls in her collection Bone Dance, “About the age of eighteen or twenty, I thought that people like me were supposed to become buffers between the Elders and the invasion forces . . . I had it the wrong way around. It is the old way of remembering the teachings and performing the ceremonies that is strong.”119 After centuries of what Ortiz calls “continuance,” Rose realized, the traditions that make up her heritage have no use for her attempts to shield them from the modern world. “Underneath what looks like loose stone,” Ortiz’s father tells him in “A Story of How a Wall Stands,” “there is stone woven together.”120 The Native American Renaissance achieved the crucial goal of cultural preservation by bringing ancient literatures into the modern world, trusting in the “woven stone” underlying all their traditions to weather even the many social and political uncertainties of the 1970s.
Among the Laguna Pueblo, oral performances begin and end with the word “sunrise,” a ritual invocation that signals the completion of one tale and the dawn of another in a neverending cycle.121 When Leslie Marmon Silko uses the same technique in Ceremony, the currents of cultural preservation that run through Tayo’s narrative inflect the word “sunrise” with extra weight: the ceaseless cycle of storytelling becomes the whole body of oral literature that has endured since long before Columbus’s arrival in the New World, and the dawn is a modern
118 Rose, "A MELUS," interview, 70.
119 Rose, Bone Dance, xiii.
120 Ortiz, Going for the Rain, 110.
121 Lincoln, Native American, 250.
cultural landscape, the next step in the stories’ long process of evolution.122 The threats tribal communities faced in the 1970s posed real risks to their cultural and political sovereignties, but the separatist responses of activists trammeled the ability of their literatures, and by extension of their cultures, to adapt to the contemporary world. Writers of the Native American Renaissance, however, recognized the inherent potential of the oral tradition to mediate between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures. By combining the conversivity and mythology of ancient tales with the literary forms and social concerns of the modern day, these authors set the Native American people on a path toward cultural preservation and fashioned a new indigenous literature from the old. Sunrise.
122 Silko, Ceremony, 243.
Bibliography
"American Indian Poetry." In Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature, edited by Jennifer McClinton-Temple and Alan Velie. Second ed. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2013. https://goo.gl/nBlga7.
Brill de Ramírez, Susan Berry. Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999.
This heavily theory-based examination of oral conventions and their applications in modern-day literature posits a need for a new mode of criticism to appreciate the participatory, dynamic nature of Native American writing. A longtime professor of English at Bradley University, Dr. Brill de Ramírez has published several works of ethnography and an exegesis of the work of Simon J. Ortiz, a poet whose work represents an important influence in this project. Contemporary American Indian Literatures brings clarity to the rather amorphous concept of conversive literature, drawing a clear aesthetic through line from precolonial oral performance to modern novels and poems.
Chavkin, Allan. Introduction to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: A Casebook, 3-16. Casebooks in Criticism 8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony is one of the more symbolically complex works of the Native American Renaissance, and this critical anthology, edited by Dr. Allan Chavkin of Texas State University, allows readers to isolate the novel into various frameworks its portrayal of animals, for instance, or its relation to ecofeminism. Chavkin's own introduction situates Ceremony in the context of the cultural and political challenges of the 1970s, supporting the idea that it is a novel rooted in the past but in dialogue with the present.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. London: Macmillan Company, 1969.
Vine Deloria, Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux essayist and activist who led the National Congress of American Indians to prominence during the tumultuous 1960s, lays out the case for reform in federal Native American policy in his classic collection of essays, Custer Died for Your Sins. Covering core activist concerns from land and water rights to self-determination and cultural independence, the collection is an invaluable guide to the origins and goals of movements like Red Power that sprang up in the years following its publication.
Erdrich, Louise. Interview by Steven Winn. City Arts and Lectures. National Public Radio. June 21, 2016. Hosted by Linda Hunt.
Louise Erdrich, a literary successor of novelists like Leslie Marmon Silko and one of the foremost Native American writers working today, devotes most of this interview on NPR’s fine arts show to her recent novel, LaRose. Forty years after the initial burst of creative work that sparked the Native American Renaissance, she affirms the importance of her tribe’s language, history, and storytelling traditions to the modern art of the novel.
Evers, Lawrence J. "Native American Oral Literatures in the College English Classroom: An Omaha Example." College English 36, no. 6 (February 1975): 649-62. doi:10.2307/374947.
Dr. Lawrence Evers's seminal essay on the literary merit of ancient Native American legends has been referenced in most subsequent studies applying literary theory to these oral tales. The author, a professor at the University of Arizona, analyzes a few representative primary sources to suggest that oral literatures have as much of a place in academic curricula as Chaucer.
Indian Peace Commission, Treaty of Fort Laramie, Treaty Doc. No. 40, 2d Sess. (1868).
The Treaty of Fort Laramie ceded wide tracts of land to the Sioux in the late 1860s but soon joined the ranks of the hundreds of other treaties broken by the United States government during the nation's expansion westward. The treaty is especially relevant to the activist 1970s because the American Indian Movement made its revival one of its fundamental demands during its occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
"Introduction." In Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature, edited by Alan R. Velie and Jennifer McClinton-Temple, vi-xi. Vol. 2 of Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature. Facts on File Library of American Literature. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2007.
Lincoln, Kenneth. "Caliban, Again." The Kenyon Review, n.s., 9, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 90-109. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4335788.
Kenneth Lincoln, one of the most influential and widely cited authorities on Native American literature to enter the field in the later part of the twentieth century, spends most of his article “Caliban, Again” applying depictions of Native American art in European literature to the modern realities of tribal art and writing. While relatively little of his energetic study is relevant to the Native American Renaissance, some of his findings provide a useful glimpse into white onlookers’ views on the upheavals of the 1970s.
Indi'n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993.
http://puffin.harker.org:2341/lib/harker/detail.action?docID=10278112&p00=indi%27n.
Lincoln, the UCLA professor of Lakota background who originally coined the term "Native American Renaissance," devotes Indi'n Humor to the tribal comedy and tendency to mock life that Deloria and Silko admiringly pointed out elsewhere. The opening section of this book, "(Pre)amble," spins through a wide array of examples of humor in contemporary Native American life and literature, indirectly supporting the idea that humor and the storytelling that encapsulates it are central to historical tribal traditions.
. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983. Kenneth Lincoln's influential 1983 analysis of the burst of creative work produced by Native American authors in the 1960s and 1970s explores the cultural and artistic implications of these writers' accomplishments through a potent blend of history, theory, and criticism. Professor Lincoln, who was adopted into the Oglala band of the Sioux tribe and was raised on a Nebraska reservation, is a Professor Emeritus of Humanities at
UCLA and is responsible for some of the nation's first American Indian Studies programs in higher education. Native American Renaissance explains both the context and subtext of key works like Ceremony and House Made of Dawn, placing them squarely in the frame of existing oral literatures and political and social tensions.
. Review of "In vain I tried to tell you": Essays in Native American Ethnopolitics, by Dell Hymes. MELUS 10, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 86-90. doi:10.2307/467020.
Lincoln is the author of Native American Renaissance, one of the earliest and most important works of scholarship on the post-House Made of Dawn Native American literary landscape, and one of the early chapters of that academic work is adapted directly from this review of acclaimed linguist Dell Hymes's "In vain I tried to tell you." In the review, Lincoln describes the symbolic significance of oral storytelling in his adoptive Lakota culture, providing ample support for the idea that the oral component of modern Native American literature is still central to its cultural and sociological importance.
Lundquist, Suzanne Evertsen. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. Continuum Studies in Literary Genre 3. New York, NY: Continuum, 2004.
The author, a professor at Brigham Young University, offers a wide-ranging survey of Native American literatures in her book, complete with a bibliography of seminal works in the field. Native American Literatures: An Introduction includes a discussion of the genre's place in American Indian Studies university programs since the end of the Native American Renaissance, a component of the field not usually addressed in earlier works.
Means, Russell, and Marvin J. Wolf. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1995.
In Where White Man Fear to Tread, the inflammatory Oglala Sioux activist Russell Means and his coworker, photographer and journalist Marvin J. Wolf, provide firsthand accounts of the storied American Indian Movement and its pursuit of risky, often revolutionary goals. Means is at least as devoted to gripping storytelling as he is to historical accuracy, so the book's usefulness as an objective chronicle of the 1970s is questionable. However, his discussion of the foundation of AIM and its seizure of Wounded Knee, South Dakota offer invaluable insight Native American into activists' goals and tactics.
Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. Modern Classics. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2010.
The Jemez Pueblo novelist, poet, and memoirist N. Scott Momaday won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn in 1968, almost single-handedly ushering in the Native American Renaissance. House Made of Dawn, like Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), presents native cultures in dialogue with the challenges and evils of the modern world, using highly symbolic language and narrative structure to defend the relevance of ancient traditions today.
Ortiz, Simon J. Going for the Rain. Native American Publishing Program 7. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1976.
Of the many indigenous writers of poetry and fiction who gained attention on and off the reservation during the 1970s, Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), now a professor at Arizona State University, engaged more actively in the melding of Native American and Western literary forms than almost anyone else. Going for the Rain, the first half of a longer planned poetry collection that originally also included the entirety of A Good Journey, consists of short poetic pieces that relay flashes of the modern world in the style of traditional oral tales; in their quiet power, they comprise a subtle but persuasive argument in favor of a hybrid Native/Western literature.
. "Going for the Rain and A Good Journey." Reading, February 26, 1975. Audio file. University of Arizona Poetry Center Audio Video Library. Accessed November 25, 2016. http://voca.arizona.edu/readings-list/83/107.
This reading, delivered at the University of Arizona just before the publication of Going for the Rain and A Good Journey in 1976 and 1977, allows the reader-listener to hear the work of accomplished poet Simon Ortiz the way the oral tales on which the poems are based were originally meant to be experienced. In Ortiz's oral annotations and edits to pieces like "The Boy and Coyote," and especially in his readings of poems cut from the final versions of both collections, the centrality of performance and the Acoma language are even more apparent than in the poems' written form.
. A Good Journey. Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1977.
A Good Journey, the second half of Acoma Pueblo poet Simon J. Ortiz's debut poetry collection (the first half being Going for the Rain), blends the oral style of traditional Native American tales with the textual medium and modern concerns of the twentieth century. Unlike its predecessor, A Good Journey consists mostly of long poems, but both collections prove that the ancient trickster figures of myth have enough staying power to survive long into the future.
Woven Stone. Sun Tracks 21. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Acoma Pueblo poet Simon J. Ortiz collects almost all of his early writing in this hefty anthology, which also includes new reflections on the role storytelling has played in the author's personal life. The lengthy Introduction situates Ortiz's art in his background, outlining the challenges he faced as a Pueblo in the twentieth century and defending, with characteristic wit and modesty, the value of the spoken word.
Owens, Louis. "'The Very Essence of Our Lives': Leslie Silko's Webs of Identity." In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: A Casebook, edited by Allan Chavkin, 91-116. Casebooks in Criticism 8. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. Previously published in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 167-91.
During the Native American Renaissance and in the decades following, Louis Owens was an important novelist and scholar of Native American literatures. His contribution to Allan Chavkin’s Casebook delves deep into the cultural framework beneath Ceremony and explores the importance of Silko’s mixed-blood heritage, echoing some of Kenneth Lincoln’s arguments about biracial Native Americans and applying them to Silko’s specific case.
Rose, Wendy. Bone Dance: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1993. Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series 27. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1994.
Wendy Rose's poetry has been drawing from her early career as an activist and anthropologist ever since her first book came out in 1973. Bone Dance reprints several of her earliest poems, composed in the first years of the Native American Renaissance, alongside an introductory essay recalling her return to the ancestral lands of her Hopi and Miwok ancestors. The poems and essay together constitute a tribute to the symbolic power of the earth and a harsh criticism of the white people who disrespect it.
. "A MELUS Interview: Wendy Rose." By Carol Hunter. MELUS 10, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 67-87. doi:10.2307/467443.
This interview in the journal Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States features the Hopi/Miwok poet Wendy Rose early in her literary career, relatively soon after her transition out of the worlds of academia and activism. In her conversation with interviewer Carol Hunter, she gives insight into the persistent social and academic marginalization of Native American voices, providing contrast with Vine Deloria’s takes on these issues fifteen years earlier.
Rostkowski, Joelle. Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans. Native Traces 3. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012. http://puffin.harker.org:2341/lib/harker/detail.action?docID=10570772.
Rostkowski, a professor at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, brings together reflections on life and art from the major artistic figures in the decades following the Native American Renaissance. The two most important conversations, those with the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor and the Jemez Pueblo novelist N. Scott Momaday, allow readers of their literary work to supplement those books with biological information about their authors.
Ruppert, James. "Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Contemporary Native American Fiction." Texas Studies in Language and Literature 28, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 209-25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754797.
In his article for Texas Studies in Language and Literature, Dr. James Ruppert of the University of Alaska Fairbanks considers the dual nature of oral-style written Native American literature and speculates that it might serve to bring together cultural and artistic traditions into a more complete hybrid. Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez draws liberally from this article in her own book-length study, Contemporary Native American Literatures and the Oral Tradition, but, unlike Brill de Ramírez, Ruppert forgoes theorybased argumentation to focus on the social implications of literature, which, in the context of the 1970s, provide a powerful refutation to the separatist rhetoric of Vine Deloria, Jr. and Russell Means.
Sarris, Greg. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Keeping Slug Woman Alive examines the role storytelling plays in historical and modern Native American communities and considers the unique tendency of oral tales to evolve
and grow over time. Sarris, a novelist and chairman of a Pomo/Miwok band centered in California, brings together interviews with Native American elders, scenes from reservation classrooms, and reminiscences about his own life as a biracial Native American to make a case for oral literature as an evolutionary, inclusive, selfperpetuating genre.
Silko, Leslie. "Toe'osh: A Laguna Coyote Story." In Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans, by Kenneth Mark Rosen, 14-16. New York, NY: Arcade Pub., 1993. Previously published in Laguna Woman: Poems. Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review Press, 1974. Accessed November 29, 2016. https://goo.gl/FQS7Tu. Silko, author of Ceremony and certainly one of the three most important writers of the Native American Renaissance, imbued the poetry in her 1974 collection Laguna Woman with the same oral storytelling techniques and criticism of the current state of Indian affairs that characterize her novels. "Toe'osh: A Laguna Coyote Story" uses the narrative form of classic trickster tales to mock the same government agents Deloria ridicules in Custer Died for Your Sins, proving the versatility of oral-style literature in the modern world.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Contemporary American Fiction. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1988. First published 1977 by Viking Penguin Inc.
Leslie Marmon Silko's landmark 1977 novel, one of the first literary works by a Native American author to receive widespread academic attention, interweaves prose narration and freer-flowing orative sections to examine the relationship between ancient traditions and the modern world. Silko, a Laguna poet and essayist who in 1981 received the Macarthur Foundation Grant, tells the tale of a traumatized Pueblo veteran battling the witchcraft of scourges like war and alcohol, posing storytelling and the revival of tribal customs as the best way to achieve the goals of Native American activist groups.
Wittstock, Laura Waterman, and Elaine J. Salinas. "A Brief History of the American Indian Movement." American Indian Movement. Accessed December 4, 2016. https://www.aimovement.org/ggc/history.html.
Wittstock, a journalist, and Salinas, a writer notable for her work bringing modern technologies to Native American reservations, offer a brief but informative overview of the landmark accomplishments and conflicts of AIM following its founding in 1968.
Russell Means, one of the organization's founders, is more thorough in his memoir of these years, Where White Men Fear to Tread, but Wittstock and Salinas's timeline is still useful to situate the events of the 1970s chronologically.