Two Waves of American Indian Literature
The First Wave: Reconciling Identity
The First Wave begins in 1969 with the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. This novel signals the entrance into a moment in American Literature in which Native American voices began to be received and recognized by the literary pubic. Soon after Momaday’s publication and subsequent success, including receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year, a number of American Indian writers emerged. According to Owens, only nine novels by American Indian authors had been published prior to 1968.20
Native American novels serve to articulate a sense of self-determination for themselves. Narrative creation becomes a political testimony at time when reservation life remains beleaguered. The enactment of termination policy spurred a resistance movement that, at least momentarily, put Native Americans, and by extension their voices and desires, on to the forefront of the national political stage. In Blood Struggle, Wilkinson characterizes the disenfranchisement of American Indians after World War II as a time with “little hope” because the “reservations were dead-end streets economically.”21 Termination and forced assimilation were also not a solution and the outlook for most was bleak at best. At this same time that this social upheaval occurred, novelists began publishing texts in an effort to express the sentiments of the era. Kenneth Lincoln’s coined “Native American Renaissance” discusses this First Wave of texts. Authors include James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday. Since then an evolution has taken place in the way American Indian writers approach their subjects and the way these novels fit into the mainstream of American literature.
Furthering this point, in his seminal text on the resurgence of Native American literature, Lincoln posits that native voices have not been silent, but rather, the literary world has participated in “failures to hear partly from the tragedies of tribal dislocation and mistranslation, partly from misconception about literature, partly from cultural indifference.”22
Both Winter in the Blood by James Welch and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko serve as exemplars of the desire felt by native people to return to the old ways and to live lives of tribal sovereignty and the exploration and desire for discovery/recovery of identity, both individual and collective. The nameless narrator of Welch’s novel “sifts through the debris of two cultures in conflict…Indian ruins scatter amid the wreckage of Western materialism.”23 The narrator’s struggles between reckoning the past memories of his loving father, First Raise, and the present reality of his pragmatic, though distant mother (as the narrator states: “I never expect much from Teresa and I never got it”24), only referred to by her Christian name, Teresa. This deliberate naming construction demonstrates the dichotomy of old verses new, Indian verses European, ancient verses modern. The narrators struggle with identity is self-characterized as a crisis of individual identity, coming “not from country or people; it came from within me.”25 Later the narrator states, “Again I felt that helplessness of being in a world of stalking white men…I was a stranger to both and both had beaten.”26 After a tumultuous series of events in the towns and bars he haunts, the narrator remarks, “I wanted to lose myself, to ditch these clothes, to outrun this burning sun, to stand beneath the clouds and have my shadow erased, myself along with it.”27 Tayo returns home to help with the burial of his grandmother. He realizes then that the only way he can recover of his lost identity is through the act of return to tribal lands and customs.
After this realization, Tayo goes to visit the old blind man who lives at the edge of town, Yellow Calf. Yellow Calf has formed a bond with Tayo and it is only at the end of the novel, when Yellow Calf describes the first bleak winter of 1883, that the past and the present seem to connect and his identity is fully reconceived and solidified, finalized upon the burial of his grandmother. The narrator in this moment understands both are a connected continuum of experience, not disparate, unaligned realities.
By the closing pages of the novel, the unnamed narrator realizes his own position in the world. The remains of American Indian culture and the pervasive Western culture of materialism can find a balanced coexistence. This recognition is, perhaps, the final claim to an identity that the narrator searches for throughout the text. Critic Louis Owens emphasizes that through the telling of the narrative the reader has just read, “the narrator has asserted some kind of order and significance within his own life.”28 His life, and by extrapolation the life of modern Native Americans, is not one of the construction of either/or but rather one of both/and.
Similar themes inform Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Lincoln remarks: “To tell a story the Indian way, no less to write, means not such much to fictionalize, as to inflect the truth of the old ways still with us.”29 In other words, Silko, working in a similar tradition to Welch, reconciles the new reality of the present with the painful reality of the past. Silko’s protagonist, Tayo, struggles with his return home, suffering from battle fatigue (which we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome), a blossoming taste for alcohol and a disdain for the hypocrisy of the return of racism against Indians, temporarily suspended during World War II, but only because the nation was in need of soldiers. A sense of double consciousness is a point of contention during the First Wave of Native American literature, most specifically found in Silko’s protagonist, Tayo.
Silko’s embedded poems, referencing creation stories like the Spider Woman, ground the novel in the old ways and Tayo’s struggle for recovery of his identity highlight the interplay of modern life. The novel functions as a methodology for its moment: the wounds of the new, Western, modern world can be healed and identity can be regained by a return to the old ways. Tayo retreats into the natural landscape of the mountains and with the help of a beautiful woman, begins to heal and find solace from the brutality of World War II.
Like the nameless narrator in Winter in the Blood, Tayo in Ceremony must return to reservation life, to the methods and means of his people to find spiritual completion. Through the characterization of Tayo, Silko leads the reader through a meta-ceremony in the act of reading, as Tayo himself is lead through the final and successful healing ceremony that he first rejects.30 In this moment the author asserts American Indian Literature as “a rich source of power and something to be celebrated rather than mourned.”31 As outlined in the historical background above American Indians during the same time these novels were published began to meld a sense of identity as both American and Indian in the policies of Self-Determination. Lincoln describes this as: “The curative memory of love calms Tayo’s nightmarish voices…The orphan can then come home.”32 Silko layers the traditions of storytelling with the issues of modernity. Tayo finds peace from the psychosis of war through the trope of a healing woman, Ts’eh. The setting of this epiphany occurring in the seclusion of the naturalistic landscape of the mountains signals Tayo’s need to rebalance his mind from a war that is ransacked by artifice and modernity. After all, the catastrophic bomb that ends World War II belongs in the realm of the modern future not the ancient past.
The Second Wave: Ambivalent Enfranchisement
A Second Wave of Native American literature parallels the aftermath of the Indian Self Determination and Educational Assistance Act of 1975. The Second Wave is characterized by an ambiguous racialized experiences, ambivalence toward the status of the identity what it means to be a Native American and the legacies, positive and negative, of the turbulent fight for enfranchisement of the previous decades. After the resurgence of Native American novels and short stories that often doubled as political statements, a new moment comes about in direct reaction to the one prior. This moment – which I am calling Second Wave – is a new period of Native American Literature in which civil rights and enfranchisement have been granted and, now, contemporary Indians seek to position themselves both in and outside reservation life. The Second Wave explores how to be an Indian in the increasingly connected life of an American in the twenty-first century.
Sherman Alexie’s works best embody this new era of Native literary production. Sherman Alexie began his career in the early 1990s; however, his engagement with tribal history and reservation life began when he was born in 1966, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Alexie openly discusses issues of poverty, alcoholism and hopeless as blights to contemporary Native American life. These issues are addressed in his writing, but also in films like Smoke Signals, and also through a plethora of interviews and talks that Alexie has given, readily available via a Google search.
Growing up in the aftermath of the protest movements of the 1960s and 70s, Alexie shifts the focus of Native American writing from return to tribal lands and identity to the interrelated tensions of realizing and maintain identity as both American and Indian concurrently. This shift signals the beginning of a new wave of Native American Literature.
Scholar Jeff Berglund, in Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, notes: “Tribal members, through the generations, evolve new traditions and ways of being in the world. Tradition is not static or opposed to innovation.”33 Alexie’s words create new traditions to evolve in his contemporary literary moment. Berglund also maintains that Alexie “has stated on more than one occasion that he’s moved to explore certain subjects not just because they shed light on the experiences of American Indian people but because they lead to a deeper understand of aspects of himself or his thoughts.”34 Alexie, in works such as The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, addresses the issues of contemporary American Indian identity as more about relationships and juxtapositions, and less about distinct, separate American Indian culture. For Alexie, to be an Indian is to be an American.
For example, the primary struggle of Arnold Spirit, Jr., in Absolutely True Diary is to be himself, in whatever ways he can. Native American reformer, Charles Eastman touched on these issues almost a century before, being able to vacillate between the two worlds of white and Indian society with a level comfortability; however, in his time Eastman was the exception, most certainly not the rule. Alexie works within this legacy in Absolutely True Diary in which the main character Arnold is working toward this balance, making peace with both sides by the conclusion of the novel. Gordy, Arnold’s first friend at Reardan, states this clearly: “Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being of the community.”35
When Arnold first leaves the reservation to attend Reardan High School, he feels the tug of resentment from people around him, including his best friend, Rowdy, but remarks, alternately that “a few folks, especially the grandmothers, thought I was a brave little dude for going to a white school.”36 Arnold himself sees the improvement in the quality of his education as an opportunity to develop his own unique identity, something he feels his parents were denied, aptly illustrated on page 12 of the text. Rowdy and others on the reservation feel that he is a traitor to his people, but through the encouragement of elders and the insistence of his math teacher, Mr. P, Arnold comes to realize that in order to develop fully, he has no other choice. This ambiguity is central to the text. The forces that push and pull Arnold are not always the clearly demarcated racial, class or economic lines that one would necessarily expect. The only Indian student in a wealthy white high school forces Arnold to search deeply for truth of his own design. He is well aware of the vast divide between himself and other students, economically, culturally and socially. He explores this dichotomy in the illustration on page 57, explaining the many differences between himself and his white schoolmates. Ultimately, after a series of deaths and distresses, the reconciliation with his estranged best friend helps him to realize that in order to fully form his identity he cannot live within the compartmentalization of the reservation. Rowdy encourages Arnold, stating, “You’re the nomadic one...I always knew you were going to leave.”37 Arnold realizes his destiny has potentiality to be different from the confines that trapped his family and friends. As he says in the penultimate chapter: “I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms.”38 Arnold Spirit, Jr. can be all American and all Indian simultaneously; he simply must accept this reality and it will be so.
This novel signifies the harkening of a new era of Native American Literature, no longer a renaissance but rather a revision. Native Americans are granted tribal autonomy. However, reservation life is not always ideal and tribal governance is not exempt from corruption and mismanagement. The Native American people have been left alone, but, as Alexie demonstrates in the character of Arnold’s father, hopelessness and loneliness pervade the existential struggles of many tribal members. The struggle for autonomy and release from bureaucratic dismantling paved the way for the battle to avoid self-destruction. Life on the reservation, as Alexie illustrates, is littered with domestic abuse, alcoholism and depression. Life off the reservation, as illustrated in earlier novels like those of Welch and Silko, also leads to depression and disillusionment. Alexie dialogues with his predecessors in that life has changed, but different is not necessarily better. There is definitively room for improvement and Alexie sees this tension as a civil rights issue intimately linked to access and privilege. Glimpses of this can be seen in Absolutely True Diary and even a brief browsing of Alexie’s Twitter feed content confirms the same.
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