Native Authors, Native Writing, and the Conflict of Identity

In the United States today there is a myth that refuses to die. It is the idea that Native Americans, their societies and cultures, have been successfully exterminated by European colonizers. This is a persistent myth, and one that serves a clear political objective. By denying the very existence of a people, contemporary U.S. society is able to deny them any form of social voice in any issue of the time, and expand disenfranchisement and oppression from the maintained the myth of “no Indians,” or of a one-dimensional Native, generally a racist stereotype of the Disney variety, such as the “redskin,” the “reservation drunk,” or slightly more modernly, the “casino Indian.” This conception, of course, completely ignores the intellect of Natives, and as such, a society that has grown to appreciate “minority literatures” such as that produced by African-American or Latina/o authors, continues to ignore the substantial cultural product of Native communities.

Part of the reason why can be understood by looking at the current discourse on what constitutes identity as a Native American. Identification as such is still heavily dependent on the U.S. government and its formal recognition in the forms of federal tribal enrollment and state tribal recognition. This system perpetuates the domination that characterizes the racialization of Native peoples, which places so much of the defining power not on Native communities, but on institutions of the Euro-American controlled state. (Yellow Bird 182) Communities are made subject to state power by the monopoly the state holds on resources, this power extends even to the subject of self-identity. Native cultures were long ago denied the right to create their own standards for acceptance into their community.

What affects the community clearly has great impact on the individual- there is an ongoing “crisis of identity” in which Native communities are debating, often heatedly, who has the right to call herself a Native/Indian, and just as importantly, who can rightfully lay claim to a Native voice (180). This question is necessarily one of culture, and judgment on it should therefore be restricted to the producers of said culture, that is, communities themselves. However, the United States has a tortured history of attempts to enforce its own decisions on the subject. For example, in 1976 a court in Massachusetts tried a land dispute case put forth by the “Mashpee,” a self-identified Native American tribe (Garroutte 61). During the case, the judge and all-white jury brought the case down to “whether or not that community had the right to a collective identity as an Indian tribe (61). Similar cases have been brought before Canadian courts, and another U.S. court first stripped the Pueblo people of their status as Natives on the grounds that they were “peaceful, quiet, and industrious people” unlike the “wild… half-naked… wandering savages” who were the true Indians (64). They were later re-accorded their status, due to the fact that they were pagans.

Now, such legal decisions can no longer be passed down with impunity due to the increasing organization of Native communities, due to the improved economic situation of a few tribes, and the generally raised awareness of Native rights and legal avenues for self-defense. This, paired with a relative lull in legal maneuvering on the part of the federal government to disenfranchise Natives, has allowed some space for tribes and bands to begin again to grapple with the issues of identity in a meaningful way. Attention now turns, then, to those who are on the margins of what is easily passable as “Indian”- those community members who, owing to their low blood quantum, their phenotype, their urban or otherwise off-reservation location, or any assortment of reasons, are left vulnerable to being ostracized by communities struggling to assert a firm sense of identity in the face of increased out-marriage and corrupt disenrollment (Yellow Bird 184).

When these individuals are also writers and thus creators of cultural output, the doubt of authenticity inevitably extends to their product. Is what they are writing “Indian enough?” There is then an interplay between community perception of the individual, the individual’s literary output, both of which ultimately return to the community’s own self-conception- if the exclude individuals, they are negatively defining themselves as “not-them,” and if they reject any cultural output, they define their culture as “not-that.”

One controversial author in this position is Sherman Alexie, author of the acclaimed novel Reservation Blues. Alexie’s own identity as a Native American is not being questioned, but his depiction of his people is. As an off-reservation, urban Native, Alexie is perceived as being out of touch with his culture and exploiting his voice for profit. Gloria Bird, in her criticism of his work, accuses him of presenting “an exaggerated version of reservation life” and a “cultural (mis)representation” (Bird 47). She highlights the “cinematic” style of Alexie’s writing, and links that characteristic to his unabashed use of non-Native references and reliance on pop culture to provide point of reference to non-Native readers. The point she eventually makes is that he “attempts to invest his novels with an Indianness” (emphasis hers) that is forced, unauthentic, and problematic in its stereotypical portrayal of real people living real lives (48).

Alexie himself addresses these critiques in an interview he gave to Studies in American Indian Literatures, which dedicated an issue of the journal to his work. He recognizes the intersection of his work as an author and as a filmmaker, and contends that both media inform each other and complement his artistic vision- he turns his books into movies. This variety, he explains, makes a difference between the “five percent of Indians [who have] read [his] books” and the “99% of Indians [who] have seen [his films]” (Purdy 4). His hyperbole of cultural traits, he attributes to coming “from a long line of exaggerators,” and takes issue with the “raging debate about ‘Is this Indian?’,” because “no one has figured out a new way to look at Indian literatures” (7).

If his writing seems distant from reservation life and traditional narratives, then it is because he recognizes that the views of the urban Native and the intersections and evolution of Native culture deserve to be articulated with a clear, unrepentant Native voice. Natives are not frozen in time, so modern developments in the world around the reservation should be acknowledged in challenging ways. Instead of theoretical arguments of authenticity, Alexie resolves the question of “What does Indian literature means?” rather pragmatically- if an average 12 year-old kid living on the reservation can’t read it,” he says, “what the hell good is it?” (8). As cultures evolve, Native narratives should evolve alongside, maintaining a couple of unchanging principles- literature and the arts should serve primarily the artists’ expression and should be accessible to the community to use as a tool to learn about itself.

Other Native authors agree. Poet Joy Harjo speaks eloquently of the “river of history moving through the blood tree” that is the “gift” of poetry given by artists to others (Harjo xxi). Elsewhere she explains the role of literature in creating a critical awareness and expression of identity, especially in times of confusion or struggle, either personal or communal, which are vital to maintaining a continuity of culture and traditions. She speaks of how “poetry made roots from the compelling need to speak, to hear, to walk gracefully from one century to the next” (xx). Giving voice to the unspoken question, she asks “Where can my nation be?” and answers with her belief that “the poet cannot be separated from place”- “there is no separation between poetry, the stories and events that link them, or the music that holds them all together, just as there is no separation between human, animal, plant, sky, and earth” (xxvi).

That is, the nation is wherever the poet herself is, the author’s search for personal identity is inextricably linked to a culture’s evolution. By analyzing a few Native authors’ work, one may therefore reach an approximate feel for the richness and diversity contained within the complexity of the modern Native American identity. In addition to examining Native author’s writings, one should also consider reviews and critiques to their work originating in Native literary circles in order to contextualize the work and provide some insight into the reception of an author by her community, her peers, and her audience.

Even a cursory glance at a variety of Native authors reveals Native cultures’ diversity an contradictions. Literary products that spring from them are bound by their authors’ experience and personal voice, not by an archetypal sense of “Nativeness.” Contrary to what hegemonic Euro-American portrayals might indicate, author Louis Owens remarks that it is not the “subservient savagery” of the sought-after “Indianness” subject to white “literary tourism,” but a mosaic of shared cultural, philosophical, or linguistic backgrounds that constitute Native literature, just like that of any other nation’s culture (Owens 59).

Owens provides a review of the historical significance of M. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn, the 1969 Pulitzer Prize winner and a “breakthrough novel for Native American writers” (58). He characterizes Momaday’s work as “an almost perfectly crafted modernist American Indian novel” (61). House Made of Dawn “performed” as would be expected of any work within the “American literary scene” of the time, yet from the first word, it was unalterably Native. The novel begins with the word “dypaloh,” a storyteller’s indication that a story is about to begin. Owens identifies this as a critical challenge to the reader, who must unavoidably “acknowledge that her or she is confronted with another language, another epistemology, another way of knowing” (63).

Being a Native author, Momaday takes a step to move Native identity, thus far the “other” of any and all narrative, directly into “the privileged center of the text.” He follows through with his promise of centralizing Native narrative, as his novel is meticulous in its description of Pueblo life, following the usual stylistic and thematic conventions of the Euro-American novel to put forth a non-white narrative, a radical step in affirming the centrality of Native culture, from which the privileged white hegemony over literary expression is broken down and must assume, for the first time, the role of the other.

On such daring first steps, Momaday proceeded to build a reputation both within Native and non-Native literary circles, and opened an avenue for other Native artists to present their work to society at large as work of equal cultural validity as any other, to be judged by equal standards, yet on the particular virtues highlighted by the specificity of the work’s origin. That is, authors could demand to be treated as such, and not as exotic storytellers to be admired and then ignored. Indeed, Luis Owens states that “[t]he magnitude of Momaday’s appropriation and subversion of modernist paradigms is impressive,” and its influence has proven long-lasting, enough so that subsequent generations of authors can look to his work not as a guide, but as a first step.

One later author mentioned by Owens is Gerald Vizenor, who wrote fictions in the 90’s as well as poems and some non-fiction work. Vizenor’s influence and prolificacy is considerable, as many Native intellectuals in the field of postmodern literary criticism often reference him or use him as an example around which to construct their arguments. Kimberly Blaeser identifies “the impetus in Vizenor’s work” to be “checking the process of literary annihilation and freeing Native American identity from the grasp of literary colonialism” (Blaeser 73). There can be no clearer echo of what Owens identified in Momaday in the late 60’s, and what Alexie is attempting to accomplish through his novels and film today. All three authors have found a strain that runs in (post-)modern Native literature, that of the creation of a libratory program through literature. Blaeser states as much- “the battle in which he is engaged [is] by no means peculiar only to him. His is the same dilemma faced by most contemporary Native American authors” [emphasis added] (73).

One of Vizenor’s particular concerns is the translation of the Native tribal oral tradition to the Western written form, a combination that he considers to incur inescapable contradictions. At first, he “saw all writing as an act that destroys the life of the oral exchange,” a process quite similar in function to that of translation from one language to another, which Blaser says, “is always in principle the privileging of one language and culture over another” (74). Thus, Vizenor’s struggle involves a revalidation of the oral tradition and an accommodation of written forms to serve tribal expression. This results in Vizenor, and alongside him, many other Native authors, creating work that “rewrites, writes over, writes through, writes differently, writes itself against the Western literary tradition” (76). It is through this deconstruction and destruction of colonial conceptions of “Indianness” that these authors make space within which to craft their own Native and literary identities, from which they will then have to face their communities for acceptance or criticism, and in either instance, a discourse long denied to them.

The representation of identity to others, such as the presentation of Nativeness by Native authors to other Native Americans and non-Natives, requires signifiers, in this case, the thematic and stylistic conventions or practices of literature. To challenge and appropriate, in fact, to liberate literature from colonialist domination, is a step that Native authors must take in the process of revolutionizing their craft and formulating a powerful Native literary tradition, one which does not seek to perpetuate Western privilege in its forms, instead adapting itself to pre-existing Native modes such as the oral tradition. This in turn will allow them to present themselves to Euro-American society as creative equals, and to engage in authentic discourse on identity and privilege within Native society. While the question of identity may yet remain unanswered, the first step is to truthfully signify whatever that identity might be. Such a creative and artistic struggle is necessary for a new semiotics in the service of Native culture. As Gerald Vizenor says, “Freedom is a sign” (Vizenor 13).

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Works Cited

Bird, Gloria. “The Exaggeration of Despair in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues.” Wicazo Sa Review 11.2 (1995): 47-52.

Garroutte, Eva Marie. “What If My Grandma Eats Big Macs?” Garroutte, Eva Marie. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 61-81.

“Introduction.” Harjo, Joy. How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. xvii-xxviii.

“Federal Indian Identification Policy: A Usurpation of Indigenous Sovereignty in North America.” Jaimes, M. Annette. The State of Native America. n.d. 123-128.

Owens, Louis. “Through an Amber Glass: Chief Doom and the Native American Novel Today.” Mixed Blood Messages: Literature, FIlm, Family, Place. 1998. 57-82.

Purdy, John. “Crossroads: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9.4 (1997): 2-18.

“A Postmodern Introduction.” Vizenor, Gerald. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

Yellow Bird, Michael. “Decolonizing Tribal Enrollment.” For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook. 2005. 179-188.