THESIS:
Native American Literature I think is NDN peoples’ best attempts at expressing what they already express [, but] in the English language which is what Anglo society seems to want.
DEFENSE:
Storytelling is an integral feature of North American Indian* way of life; it has been for a very long time. It’s well established that with each new communications technology coming to the Americas; Native Americans are there ably grasping the language, expertise and rigor needed to further it. This includes marathon runners, Pony Express riders, telephone operators, Code Talkers, postal workers and even cable TV linemen.
Does it surprise anyone then that so many Native Americans have become major writers and filmmakers? Here’s a short list of contemporary authors, directors and producers: (by no means comprehensive or complete)
Benally, Bruchac, Burns, Cook-Lynn, Cornsilk, Deer, Deloria Jr., Eagleshirt, Erdrich, Eyre, Giago, Harjo, Louis, Mankiller, Northrup, Ortiz, Rustywire, Sweet, Trudell, Yazzie, and Yellow Robe.
Today some NDNs speak only English but for many it is their second language while some people are completely bilingual. There are still some well respected contemporary storytellers alive today who never speak English but this essay will not try to address much of that, focusing mostly on the American dialect of the English language which, for better or worse, remains the dominant culture’s preferred language of communication. So Native Americans tell profound stories in the newly acquired (relatively speaking) English language. This gives a unique flavor to some of the writing styles one will see in Indian films and books.
“I talked both languages in streams that ran alongside each other,†writes Louise Erdrich in her novel Tracks, “over every rock, around every obstacle.†This is her character Nanapush speaking, who also points out “even a sledge won’t stop me once I start.†(Erdrich,7)
Everyone likes to express themselves, but the NDN people seem to have an even greater more demonstrative burning desire to say something. This might serve as an adequate, if somewhat superficial, way to explain why so many First Nations people are writing and directing so much of America’s greatest contemporary literature and films.
“I got well by talking,†Nanapush says in Tracks. “Death could not get a word in edgewise, got discouraged, and traveled on.†(Erdrich,46)
A glimpse of America’s history with so many Indian nations falling victim to genocide would show that death certainly stopped many people, but not everyone. Again, those who live on surely do have something to say. If television, movies and books are how Americans express themselves best; then many North American Indians are going to do likewise, and excel at those same forms of expression. They’ve already been quite adept at winter storytelling, painting, crafting, sculpture, music and dance for tens of thousands of years. So there can be no doubt the mastering of celluloid, paper and digital media would just require adding a few new forms to what’s already there.
I shouldn’t have been caused to live so long, shown so much of death, had to squeeze so many stories in the corners of my brain. They’re all attached, and once I start there is no end to telling because they’re hooked from one side to the other, mouth to tail. During the year of sickness, when I was the last one left, I saved myself by starting a story. (Ibid.)
Watch Gary Farmer as Philbert Bono in Johnathan Wacks’ film Pow Wow Highway. Philbert lives in two worlds. He must be “NDN†while at the same time “American.†What do each of those mean? He tries to find out. One clue is while Buddy’s inside Hi-Fi Hut demanding his money back because he couldn’t get the radio to work, and he begins tearing up the place. Philbert quickly reads the directions and figures out the easiest way to turn the stereo on. He paid good attention in school or something; or to grownups along the way? Maybe Buddy didn’t or maybe he forgot. (Pow Wow)
Well many First Nations people do listen to grownups and pay good attention in school. Back to Sara Marie Ortiz, for example:
“American Indians are more politically dangerous than ever before,†she says. “We have more money. We have more education. We know the political process better than our elders did at our age. Ortiz is author Simon Ortiz’ youngest daughter. At the time of this letter, published in the book Letters From Young Activists, Ortiz was a 22 year old creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Asked to submit a short bio to include with her letter, she mentioned she would “like to become the president of the IAIA.†(Boudin,78).
Is Ortiz aiming high? Only the best. Since then she’s gathered up an MFA in Creative Writing, a Truman Capote Literary Award Fellowship, and also had time to found the IAIA Women’s Society in 2005, a first-of-its-kind advocacy-in-action organization founded by and for the Native women artists of the IAIA.
I am an American Indian, but I am so much more than that. The worst thing you can do is underestimate the minority. Indians are not just Indians anymore. You can’t really count us in this day and age. My enrollment number doesn’t make me Indian. My family and my human history is what makes me Indian. A better name for us is the Hanoh’ – The People. We are of mixed heritage and ancestry. Politically mixed, mixed tax bracket, mixed everything. We’re everywhere, and we’re more organized than ever. (Boudin,82).
The late William Moses Kunstler’s parents had very high aspirations for him too; even showing it in naming him Moses after some dead Jewish relative way back there in their lineage. He went on to become one of the most famous 20th Century Constitutional attorneys making not just Who’s Who and Black’s Law Dictionary, but nearly every contemporary American history book as well. You might better recognize him from helping defend some of the people at Wounded Knee in the early 70s, or as a tireless champion of affording Leonard Peltier his due process and human rights in general. Did he have high aspirations for his children too? A quick search of Imdb.com for the Kunstler name will show that daughters Emily and Sarah sure are keeping busy. Issues they’re tackling these days can be shown in the following titles, Getting Through to the President (2004) and Tulia, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War (2003). Sarah also co-founded the Off Center Media and the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice along with her sister and manages to find time to gather footage for documentaries like “In the Name of Security†about the Palestine/Israel land dispute whenever her job as a New York City criminal defense attorney doesn’t keep her too busy.
Smoke Signals, an adventurous “coming-of-age” buddy film, road comedy based on Sherman Alexie’s book “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven†became the first major motion picture to be written, directed, and co-produced by a Native American. While Alexie’s parents speak fluently in their Spokane language, Salish; Alexie grew up speaking just English but understands some of his parents’ talk.
These characteristics help the Chris Eyre production go even further along than earlier breakthrough feature-length films like PowWow Highway and Dances With Wolves. Alexie’s humor around Custer and Columbus signifies an ability to forgive without ever forgetting and the same goes for the John Wayne’s Teeth drum song. All three humans (Columbus, Custer, Wayne) were so hate-filled and hurtful toward Native American people for so long that it might be impossible for just one person to ever forgive. Making light, making heavy, and even poking barbs in reverse affords a whole people the levity they might need to live another day. This seems quite parallel to Yiddish humor which lived alongside the Jews in Hitler’s vast concentration camps. Many people who’d lived through encampments like Dachau, Belzec and Auschwitz have said they practically resided in humor because if they hadn’t they might have killed themselves earliest on. Use of conventions such as high humor and illuminating the historical seems to come naturally to Native Americans as well.
In another Chris Eyre movie Skins, based on the Adrian C. Louis novel of the same title, storytelling is prominent throughout. Take for instance, Rudy Yellow Lodge, played by Eric Schweig seeing a spider which flashes him back to when he was 10 years old and his brother Mogie, played by Graham Greene, had to carry him all the way home from the outhouse because he got bit in the nuts by a spider. All of the leading characters in Skins are fully developed, and humorous even while wrestling with very dramatic issues. Alcohol, arson, violence, crime; all of this is tackled in drama.
At the risk of upsetting the “great chain of being,†(scala naturæ) one might note that horses tend to be far more observant than the typical Anglo Americans. And NDNs might be seen as every bit as perceptive as all the animals in the kingdom, if not even more alert. Forever watching and listening to all of the animals around them, not just their dogs and cats. Would it be a surprise that observation and memorization skills would show up in Native American literature and film?
The horse was stamping her front feet and blowing her nostrils open wide to catch the mountain-lion smell that was on the wind now. Tayo stroked her neck and made sure the rope was tied securely to the tree. He went into the clearing where the mountain lion had stood; he knelt and touched the footprints, tracing his finger around the delicate edges of dust the paw prints had made, deep round imprints, each toe a distinctive swirl. He kept his back to the wind and poured yellow pollen from Josiah’s tobacco sack into the cup of his hand. He leaned close to the earth and sprinkled pinches of yellow pollen into the four footprints. Mountain lion, the hunger. Mountain lion, the hunger’s helper. (Silko, 182)
Many would say Navajo poet Orlando White is already fluent in the English language; but the Brown University Masters candidate will tell you he’s still learning the heck out of it. And perhaps he’s even diving more deeply into the language’s each and ever nuance than most native English speakers.
Look at his poem “k.â€
an open hand.
a letter will never recur before a or after z, it is space, white that occupies. and underneath, it absorbs fluid, dark until design etiolates. an absence of how likely that some thing will disappear, sharp angles indicate sound but also indicate its measure of lifespan, how long as a surface phenomena will it be print? people write and change, but language when written did not. (White)
White has taken the letter “k†all the way back to its historical roots right down to the pictograph itself. He looks at the etymology, any other historical origins, everything. He says he’s doing this with each letter in the English alphabet, too.
Navajo servicemen, along with Comanche and Choctaw people were some of the original Code Talkers who aided the U.S. Government in transmitting secrets all over the world in a form (hybrids of their own picturesque languages) that was never cracked; not even by enemy combatants who intercepted some of them. No wonder a young Orlando White would find it informative to perform virtual archeology on the very roots of the English language imagining it to be 500 years dead. As he reads his poetry aloud, people are often impressed at how he must have been able to regard things in ways others would never have even dreamt about seeing. Or is he just being a whole lot more observant and working more diligently at it?
“My father, who works with stone,†says Simon Ortiz in his poem A Story of How a Wall Stands, “says, ‘That’s just the part you see.’†Ortiz explains in his introduction that at Acu, there is a “wall almost 400 years old which supports hundreds of tons of dirt and bones – it’s a graveyard built on a steep incline – and it looks like it’s about to fall down the incline but will not for a long time.†(Purdy,518).
Look for a moment at a few lines of Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem:â€
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion. (Purdy,479).
Most people choose not only to ignore that which they cannot see or hear; but they will often build a complete world of denial around it. What wasn’t totally obvious simply must not exist. Why even think about it. The flaring nostrils of Leslie Marmon Silko’s horse can’t be telling anything. The horse must just be neurotic or something. Simon Ortiz’ father’s 400 year old wall must be held up by Hollywood string or magic mice or something. Never mentioned is the care, respect, hard work and attention to detail that might have been paid. They deny these things at their own peril. It’s far more typical in Native American literature and film for many subtle things to be just as important to the theme and climax of a story as those things which are most obvious or first mentioned.
That’s just art mirroring reality. It’s far more typical for the NDN horse rider to dismount his horse and ask him for more information or at least to watch him carefully hoping to learn more. Maybe it’s not a mountain lion he smells but another rider on a horse coming the other way with bad intentions. Or maybe it’s a stagecoach with a Gatlin gun on top locked and loaded. No wonder Indians have been so often stereotyped as bending down to stick an ear to the ground so they can tell the nearest white man if there’s a train coming or not!
And the typecasting allows the typical Anglo American to rely on his Indian scout to discern all the things necessary to keep an entire cavalry or community alive. Again, he sets up this dynamic at his own peril. It allows him to remain lazy, unobservant, and prone to suffer any change around the world rather than thrive alongside it; and participate and dance. The observant NDN can teach his children and grandchildren – and anyone else’s’ people if only they’re receptive – how to remain so observant. And what if books and films in the English language are the dominant culture at the moment? That’s what the NDN will use, and use best.
And so because I have learned your system and your doctrines well (perhaps a little too well) I have made a new religion. A religion of loving you with my truth, America. A religion of forgiving you for trying – and failing – to kill me, America. I am dying, but it’s on my terms now. You are mine, America, like an abusive parent, or a tiny scratch on the roof of your mouth that you just can’t seem to stop tonguing. We’ve been in this together for some time – and it’s time to compare our notes, America. (Boudin,83).
Adrian C. Louis observed something in his book Evil Corn quite similar to what former Department of Education Senior Policy Advisor Charlotte Iserbyt said in her book Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. But he found a way to say it in just 32 words.
“Trapped in my final profession,†he says “I now stagger from windowless cave to cave wondering how is it these kids have made it to college lacking what I learned in junior high English.†(Louis,70)
It might not be as much that they didn’t learn it, as that they never cared to remember anything from one year to another, like Buddy in Pow Wow Highway rather than Philbert. How can someone be asked to synthesize something from 7th, 9th, and then 10th grade into something they can then apply in their last year of high school or an early college literature class if they never even thought to observe and think critically about things they learned in 3rd and 4th grade; such as Columbus discovering America maybe or Whigs and Tories coming to New England for freedom of religion, and not so many other reasons too.
In the Nonfiction section of Purdy’s Nothing But The Truth anthology, Simon Ortiz talks about his Uncle Steve helping sustain cultural authenticity in nationalism even as times change.
There may be some question about why Uncle Steve was shouting Juana and Pedro, obviously Spanish names, non-Indian names. I will explain. In the summer months of June, July, and August, there are in the Pueblo Indian communities of New Mexico celebrations on Catholic saints’ days. Persons whose names are particular saints’ names honor those names by giving to the community and its people. In turn, the people honor those names by receiving. The persons named after the saints such as John or Peter—Juan, Pedro – throw from housetops gifts like bread, cookies, crackerjacks, washcloths, other things, and the people catching and receiving dance and holler the names. It will rain then and the earth will be sustained; it will be a community fulfilled in its most complete sense of giving and receiving, in one word: sharing. And in sharing, there is strength and continuance. (Purdy,120).
NDN peoples have something to say, to be sure. And if it must be in English; well then they’re going to tell us about it.
WORKS WRESTLED WITH:
Boudin, Chesa, and Kenyon Farrow, and Bernardine Dohrn. Letters from Young Activists:
Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books). New York: Nation Books, 2005.
Erdrich, Louise. Tracks. Harper Perennial, 2004.
Louis, Adrian. Evil Corn. Ellis Press, 2004.
Pow Wow Highway. Directed by Jonathan Wacks. Starz / Anchor Bay. DVD.
Purdy, John, and James Ruppert. Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American
Literature. Prentice Hall, 2000.
Skins. Dir. Chris Eyre. Perf. Joseph American Horse. DVD. First Look Pictures.
Silko, Leslie. Ceremony: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
Smoke Signals. Dir. Chris Eyre. Perf. Adam Beach. DVD. Miramax
White, Orlando. “An Evening with Orlando White.” Native American Cultural Society.
University Of Connecticut, Groton. 26 Feb. 2008.
*Author’s note. Just as James A. Michener never resolved what is the best way to pronounce the country and people name in his book Caribbean, this author will use the terms NDN, Indian, First Nations Person, Native American and North American Indian interchangeably throughout wherever it seems to flow the most smoothly. Bernard Malamud once suggested simply calling Indians “people,†as that is how most referred to themselves when he asked respectfully. While this is brilliant and forward thinking it would be somewhat confusing in this essay.
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