"I don't go into the studio with the idea of "saying" something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue."--Richard Diebenkorn

Click here to read more about Richard Diebenkorn and his paintings. Diebenkorn Cityscape

A Little Historical Background

Native American literature has been strongly influenced by the history of Native Americans on this continent. It is not possible to give a complete history of the oppression of Native Americans by the Europeans in this short lecture, but here are a few of the "highlights":

These laws were in addition to the attempted genocide of tribes in the West, and attempts to eradicate Native American culture by enforced education in boarding schools (which often involved kidnapping Indian children and imprisoning them in schools where they were punished for speaking their native languages).

Literary Traditions in Native American Literature

Native American literature is oral and communal in origin. Before Native Americans began writing in English or other European languages, the concept of a single author was incomprehensible. Native American storytellers recited stories, and also improved upon the details or revised them to fit current needs or situations, before passing them on to the next generation, which did the same. The outcome of the story was already known to the audience, and the audience's response was as important to the story as the storyteller's. Thus, each story originates with the community as a whole, and each retelling reinforces the values of the community.

In these stories can be found a worldview which is at odds with European views. The European vision of life is based on opposites and on linear thinking and perceptions of time and reality: man is separate from nature and superior to it; thus, individuals are separate from others; this places a heavy emphasis on individualism. Time can be measured and events can be assigned specific beginning and ending dates; the past is separate from the present and future. Events are caused by other events; sometimes the causes aren't known, but it is assumed that, with enough knowledge, they can eventually be known and explained rationally.

The Native American worldview, by contrast, is based on the concepts of unity and cycles. It places an emphasis upon the totality of existence: humans are equal to all other elements and creatures, superior to none. Life and events move in cycles which repeat themselves in one form or another; the ending and the beginning run together. Not everything in the universe can be explained; sometimes events are random, and not everything has a cause-and-effect explanation.

Obviously, trying to explain the basic assumption of European and Native American cultures in two paragraphs will lead to oversimplifications and overgeneralizations; but even such a brief summary will reveal some of the fundamental conflicts between the two cultures' ways of perceiving the world, and may also help to explain why they had such different ways of living in it.

The Trickster

Nearly all Native American cultures have a "Trickster." This is a character who combines both animal and human traits. In some stories, he is the being who creates the physical world. He is sometimes a cultural hero, and sometimes a stupid, officious meddler whose interference compromises the success of an undertaking. He is often pictured as a buffoon.

The Trickster myths are best preserved in the Plains tribes (where he is Coyote), and the tribes of the North Pacific Coast (where he is Raven). Coyote often appears as the personification of unbridled appetite, a conglomeration of all vices: cruel, deceitful, gluttonous, gullible, unmerciful, ungrateful. Other times, he is pictured as the mighty magician, who brings great benefits into the world (although these are often less a result of altruism than accidental results of his efforts to satisfy his own appetites).

The Trickster mythology is far more detailed and complicated than I can present it here; for more information, a good source is Paul Radin's The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1987.

Themes and Issues in Contemporary Native American Literature

One of the key themes in Native American literature today is the issue of identity. The U.S. government's deliberate policy of "mainstreaming" stripped many Native Americans of their cultural identity. Reconstructing this identity is, for many Native American writers, a huge task. For others, this task is complicated by the fact that many Native Americans have mixed blood, to one degree or another. Thus, the issue of who is a "real" Indian becomes central. Karen I. Blu, examining this issue in The Lumbee Problem, comments, "For Whites, blood is a substance that can be either racially pure or racially polluted. Black blood pollutes White blood absolutely, so that, in the logical extreme, one drop of Black blood makes an otherwise White man black...White ideas about 'Indian blood' are less fomalized and clear-cut...It may only take one drop of Black blood to make a person a Negro, but it takes a lot of Indian blood to make a person a 'real' Indian."

The issue of identity is made even more complicated by the fact that the American Indian is, in American consciousness, an invention, a product of literature and art. Thus, Native American authors struggle against stereotypes perpetrated by earlier American writers. James Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye was the "romantic savage," the "noble stoic" who was always competent in the wilderness, never showed (or apparently felt) pain or fear, and was happily subordinate to his more sophisticated, morally-centered European companion/master. Herman Melville's Queequeg, in Moby-Dick, created the stereotype of the heroic but doomed savage. Mark Twain's Injun Joe, in Tom Sawyer, furthered the cliche of the immoral, tortured, sometimes vicious renegade.

In the 20th century, Westerns hardened Americans' perceptions of Native Americans as amoral, sometimes vicious, sometimes noble, always crafty and cunning, stoic, and doomed. To this day, many Americans raised on John Wayne movies expect Native Americans to dress in feathers and moccasins, speak broken English, and greet others by saying "How."

Such inventions have little resemblance to living, breathing Native Americans or their current lives or beliefs. A number of Native American writers today have taken on the task of rejecting these stereotypes. Humor plays a large role in this effort; writers such as Thomas King and Sherman Alexie, without ignoring more serious issues, deliberately use humor to counter the image of the doomed, tragic Indian.

Further complicating issues of identity is the fact that using a written language to relay an oral tradition in subtle ways changes that tradition and its power. Indian stories are oral and communal, constantly changing, and have the power to create reality. Written stories are credited to one person (thus shifting the focus from the community to the individual); once written, they are fixed and immutable; and they tend to describe or recount reality, rather than creating it.

Thus, the issue of constructing or reconstructing an identity looms large in Native American literature. Writers such as Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko take their characters through a process of self-recovery, self-recognition, and reintegration with traditional beliefs and practices.

Another issue Native American writers face is the problem of a mixed audience. Some of their readers will be tribal relations, who have taken an active role in the cultural practices and beliefs described in the literature; other readers will be Indians from other tribal cultures, who will recognize similarities but not have the same degree of intimacy with the culture described; and yet other readers will be non-Indians who come to the fiction with a completely alien worldview. Any reader who approaches Native American literature without at least some knowledge of the culture will be confused, or at best, experience only a superficial reading of the work.

Native American writers differ from mainstream contemporary writers in important ways. Although they, too, repudiate the American Dream, and find themselves struggling against alienation, loss of self and community, they are almost always given (and often achieve) the possibility to recover from frgamentation and achieve a wholeness of self and community. As Louis Owens writes, in Other Destinies, "Ultimately, whereas postmodernism celebrates the fragmentation and chaos of experience, literature by Native American authors tends to seek transcendence of such ephemerality and the recovery of 'eternal and immutable' elements represented by a spiritual tradition that escapes historical fixation, that places humanity within a carefully, cyclically ordered cosmos and gives humankind irreducible responsibility for the maintenance of that delicate equilibrium."

Native American Authors and Novels

Prior to 1968, only 9 novels by Native American authors had been published:

However, in 1968, N. Scott Momaday wrote House Made of Dawn, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and that seemed to open the floodgates. Following is a list of just a few Native American authors and novels:

My thanks to Louis Owens's Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), for much of the above information.

Background on Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie was born in 1966 and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington (near Spokane). He went to Gonzaga University, then transferred to Washington State University. He began writing in the late 1980s. His first collection of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing, was published in 1992. His first collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which received a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was published in 1993. He writes poetry and novels; he also participates in (and wins) poetry slams. He co-wrote, with Chris Eyre, the screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals, which was based on Alexie's short story "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona."

Among Sherman Alexie's works are the following:

For more detailed biographical information, see http://www.fallsapart.com/biography.html.

To read a very interesting interview with Alexie, see http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/alexie/general.htm