The Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement

by Alan R. Velie, A. Robert Lee

Overview

The outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko constitute what critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 termed the Native American Renaissance. This collection of essays takes the measure of that efflorescence.



The contributors scrutinize writers from Momaday to Sherman Alexie, analyzing works by Native women, First Nations Canadian writers, postmodernists, and such theorists as Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. Weaver’s own examination of the development of Native literary criticism since 1968 focuses on Native American literary nationalism. Alan R. Velie turns to the achievement of Momaday to examine the ways Native novelists have influenced one another. Post-renaissance and postmodern writers are discussed in company with newer writers such as Gordon Henry, Jr., and D. L. Birchfield. Critical essays discuss the poetry of Simon Ortiz, Kimberly Blaeser, Diane Glancy, Luci Tapahonso, and Ray A. Young Bear, as well as the life writings of Janet Campbell Hale, Carter Revard, and Jim Barnes. An essay on Native drama examines the work of Hanay Geiogamah, the Native American Theater Ensemble, and Spider Woman Theatre.



In the volume’s concluding essay, Kenneth Lincoln reflects on the history of the Native American Renaissance up to and beyond his seminal work, and discusses Native literature’s legacy and future. The essays collected here underscore the vitality of Native American literature and the need for debate on theory and ideology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806144023
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	11/20/2013
Series:	American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series , #59
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alan R. Velie is David Ross Boyd Professor in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of more than forty articles and three books and the editor of eight books, including the anthology American Indian Literature.


A. Robert Lee is retired as Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan, and is the author or editor of numerous books, including Native American Writing and Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a, and Asian American Fictions, which won the 2004 American Book Award.

Read an Excerpt

The Native American Renaissance

Literary Imagination and Achievement

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By Alan R. Velie, A. Robert Lee

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5133-5

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CHAPTER 1

Turning West

Cosmopolitanism and American Indian Literary Nationalism

JACE WEAVER

In 2001, the historian Daniel Richter published Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. This important monograph examined how, in the first instance, North American indigenes might have attempted to come to terms with the scattered appearances of Europeans during the "Age of Discovery" and the possibility of a new, unknown world across the waters. He writes,

Hard facts are very difficult to come by.... They probably heard mangled tales of strange newcomers long before they ever laid eyes on one in the flesh, and, when rare and novel items reached their villages through longstanding trade and communication, they discovered European things long before they confronted European people. Rumors and objects, not men and arms, were the means of discovery, and we can only imagine how Native imaginations made sense of the skimpy evidence that reached them."

Richter then explores how, during the later colonial era, when the settler colonizers had firmly settled in, those same indigenous peoples sought to preserve the stability of the shaky and inherently unstable "middle ground"—to use Richard White's term—as they negotiated with and among European metropoles and their North American colonial avatars, even as they became, at the same time, increasingly integrated into the transatlantic economy.

As Richter suggests, certainly since first contact the lives of many Native persons and peoples have been animated, circumscribed, even defined in relation to Europe and Amer-European settler colonizers. Natives have repeatedly been required to face east and react to Europeans, their cultures, their material goods, and their ideas. With the collapse of the middle ground and the rise of the United States as the dominant power in the center of the continent, Natives were encouraged—in many cases, forced—to assimilate into American culture. The halting closure of the Indian Wars, the establishment of the reservation system, and the creation of boarding schools combined to formalize a system that had begun with the earliest Spanish reducciones, or New England "praying towns," or countless other missions: leave the blanket, learn English, embrace Christianity, and, in the process, swap your culture—Cherokee, Muskogee, Apache, Sioux, Comanche, whatever—for a prescribed Euro-Western alternative.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this dynamic again played itself out in a surprising venue—literature. Like Richter's Indians of the colonial era, who increasingly found themselves imbricated in transatlantic economic exchange, Native Americans were increasingly integrated into American economic, educational, and cultural systems even as they maintained the separate sovereignties, however clipped, of their tribal nations and their own cultural practices. Native oral traditions stretch back tens of thousands of years, and Natives have produced literatures written in English since 1763, often with great sophistication. The publication of N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn in 1968, however, marked the beginning of what has been called the Native American Literary Renaissance, a term coined by Kenneth Lincoln. In 1969, House Made of Dawn became the first and thus far only work by a Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. There had been a flowering of Native writers in the 1930s. Lynn Riggs, D'Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews all produced important works. But the boomlet quickly faded. After Momaday's achievement, however, the doors of publishing houses seemed to open wide for Native authors. Through them walked Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, and many others who emerged as major figures in Native American literature. This time the boom did not subside.

The history limned briefly above is well known. What is less discussed is the reception of this literature and the development of criticism about it.

In 1969, Alan Velie became the first English professor in the country to teach a course in Native American literature, doing so at the behest of Indian students at the University of Oklahoma. More classes soon followed, there and elsewhere, and as scholar-readers taught, they read and recovered earlier texts, like those of McNickle and Mathews mentioned above. Early anthologies appeared—like Kenneth Rosen's The Man to Send Rain Clouds and Voices of the Rainbow and Geary Hobson's The Remembered Earth. The first critical work, Charles Larson's American Indian Fiction, was published in 1978. Four years later, Velie published Four American Indian Literary Masters, followed the next year by Lincoln's era-defining monograph. In 1985, Arnold Krupat served up For Those Who Come After. In the process of teaching, reading, and researching, these critics learned about Native cultures and histories. Other non-Natives who made forays into Native literature did not bother. Armed with the confidence of Matthew Arnold's disinterested readers, they thought they could "get at the truth" of the texts without understanding the places from whence they came.

What was notably absent was the active engagement of Native voices. Paula Gunn Allen published her seminal essay, "The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Indian Perspective on American Indian Literature," in 1975, following it up with pieces like "A Stranger in My Own Life: Alienation in American Indian Prose and Poetry" (1980) and "'The Grace that Remains'—American Indian Women's Literature" (1981). Geary Hobson wrote a significant critical introduction to his 1979 anthology. And poet and scholar Simon Ortiz issued his compelling challenge, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," in 1981. Yet literary criticism by Natives remained sporadic and spotty, and few non-Native critics, with the notable exceptions of Velie and Lincoln, responded to these Native scholars.

All of this changed radically in the 1990s. In 1992, in his book Ethnocriticism, Krupat wrote that "what might be called an 'indigenous' criticism for Indian literatures remains to be worked out." That same year witnessed the publication of Louis Owens's monograph, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, and Jeannette Armstrong's edited volume, Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. From that time to the present, the number of Native American literary critics has grown seemingly exponentially every year. The dialogue between them and non-Native critics, on the one hand, and among them, on the other, has been spirited. With literary critical circles dominated by postmodernism, postcolonialism, and high theory, many of these new Indian critics felt that they were being "schooled" by non-Natives to continue facing East for their critical models and apparatuses.

During the last two decades, one of the most important debates has been between so-called nationalists and cosmopolitans. The argument has been lively and vociferous. It has also too often been acrimonious with, until recently, very little middle ground between the two sides.

In 1989, in his book The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon, Krupat argued that "the canon of American literature must substantially include the literary production of Native American and Afro-American peoples quite as well as those of the Euro-American peoples whose culture came to dominate the United States." He thus made the case for inclusion of Native literature within the American canon. He drew distinctions among what he termed "local," "national," and "cosmopolitan" literatures. The local is traditional indigenous or ethnic literatures. National literatures are the sum total of all literary productions within the territory of given "national formations." Cosmopolitan literature is the totality of national literatures. For Krupat, both national and cosmopolitan literatures necessarily involve "a commitment to dialogism and heterodoxy." He follows Paul Rabinow in defining cosmopolitanism "as an ethos of macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness ... of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical trajectories, and fates."

Seven years later, in The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture, Krupat wrote that "the sociopolitical values of cosmopolitanism" have been "opposed by some Native American critics whose pedagogical strategies make claims to cultural 'sovereignty' and 'autonomy,' the political implications of which strategies are nationalistic." The trenches began to be dug in Flanders fields. To cosmopolitans, following postcolonial theorists like Homi K. Bhabha and Kwame Anthony Appiah, nationalism was cramped, rejectionist, and exclusionary as opposed to a liberal cosmopolitanism engaged in a globalized conversation. Nationalism reified tribal identities where cosmopolitanism embraced the simple reality of modern cultural hybridity. To nationalists, cosmopolitanism erased tribal sovereignty in that it promoted a freewheeling, rootless postmodern identity. They were being told, they felt, to face East and salute once more. Not much room for common ground there.

The "Native American critics" to whom Krupat was referring in The Turn to the Native were principally Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Robert Warrior. Cook-Lynn, one of the founding doyennes of Native American studies, is a poet, novelist, and literary critic. In her 1993 Wicazo Sa Review essay, "Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty" (included in her 1996 book, Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner), she declaims against cosmopolitanism and defends nationalism. She writes,

[T]he violation of nationalistic or Third World models in fiction and criticism should be of legitimate concern to scholars and should become part of the discourse in literary theory as it is applied to the works of Native American writers.... Scholarship and art must say something about the real world, mustn't they? As Vine Deloria, Jr., asked the anthropologists in 1970, "Where were you when we needed you?" Indians may now ask of their writers, two decades later, "Where were you when we defended ourselves and sought clarification as sovereigns in the modern world?"

Krupat considered the essay inaccurate and misguided. He nonetheless called it "the strongest and best account of the 'nationalist,' 'nativist,' and anti-'cosmopolitan' position.... [N]o supporter of the internationalist or cosmopolitan position should proceed without taking Cook-Lynn's arguments into account."

Two years after Cook-Lynn's essay originally appeared, Robert Warrior published Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. A study in intellectual history, the compact monograph was arguably the first book-length intervention in American Indian literary nationalism. John Purdy, in his recent book, Writing Indian, Native Conversations, observes, "By 1995 ... the discourse had expanded to include multiple generations of writers and scholars, and conditions were right for the reconsideration of the assumptions upon which much of the earlier criticism was based."

Warrior compared Vine Deloria and Osage writer John Joseph Mathews on the issue of sovereignty and argued that Native Americans must look to their own internal intellectual resources. To emphasize the point, and as a political statement, he quoted Native writers and thinkers almost exclusively. His most significant contribution to the ongoing discourse in literary scholarship was his coining of the term "intellectual sovereignty." Warrior deliberately left the meaning of the phrase open-ended to "allow the definition and articulation of what that means to emerge as we critically reflect on that struggle [for intellectual sovereignty itself]."

In The Turn to the Native, Krupat takes issue with Warrior's argument, pointing out that the twin subjects of his comparative study, Deloria and Mathews, were themselves cosmopolitans. He writes, "[S]urely the thought of Mathews and Deloria can no more be understood without reference to Euramerican tradition than can Warrior's." He continues:

Further attention to Mathews and Deloria and to, perhaps, John Milton Oskison, Francis La Flesche, Gertrude Bonnin, and a great many other formidable Native American intellectuals might, at this historical juncture, be more important than continued attention to any of a number of non-Native intellectuals. But to consider these Native thinkers as "autonomous," "unique," "self-sufficient," or "intellectually sovereign"—as comprehensible apart from Western intellectualism—is simply not possible. Nor, if it were possible, would it be useful for the purposes claimed. As Appiah has poignantly written, "For us to forget Europe is to suppress the conflicts that have shaped our identities; since it is too late for us to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us."

Krupat ignores or misses that Warrior himself declared in Tribal Secrets, "The framework I have suggested, finally, is not an attempt to define a critical discourse free from influences outside of American Indian experience. By following the path I have suggested here, though, I believe I am placing myself in the same position as every American Indian person who struggles to find a way toward a self-determined future."

In 1997, I entered the fray with That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community, a study of Native written literatures in English from 1768 to the present. Building on Warrior's work, I focused on the relationships of Native writers to Native communities. To interrogate these relationships, I coined the word "communitism." I wrote, "Central to this study is the concept of communitism.... Communitism is related to Vizenor's 'survivance,' Warrior's 'intellectual sovereignty,' and Georges Sioui's 'autohistory.' Its coining, however, is necessary because none of these terms from Native intellectuals nor any word from the Latin root communitas carries the exact sense implied by this neologism. It is formed by a combination of the words 'community' and 'activism.' Literature is communitist to the extent that it has a proactive commitment to Native community."

Unlike Warrior, I did not refrain from engaging non-Native critics and thinkers. In particular, I both employed and critiqued critical theory. Like Warrior, however, I said that Native American critics must look first to internal American Indian sources. Alan Velie accused me of "pluralist separatism."

The following year, Craig Womack published Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Reviewing it in American Literature, Patricia Penn Hilden called it "a brave, controversial, and rich argument in favor of establishing a new Native American literary scholarship, driven by Native concerns and written either by Native scholars or by those with language skills, cultural knowledge, and respect that non-Natives must possess if they are to assist with this project." Womack not only argued for drawing upon internal critical sources but went further, arguing for privileging internal readings of Native literature. Largely examining literature produced by Muscogee writers, Womack, himself Muscogee, rejected postmodernism and high theory, arguing instead for tribally specific criticism.

Though Womack did not cite either Tribal Secrets or That the People Might Live, Red on Red was consonant with those works. Those three books came to be seen as a kind of unspoken literary nationalist trilogy, and the three of us were viewed as a troika, the "three W's" of Native American literature, as Clara Sue Kidwell called us. Perhaps because of his advocacy of tribal centric readings, perhaps because he used the word "separatism" in his title, perhaps because of his barbed, often satirical, style—maybe due to all three—Womack's book seemed to provoke the angriest response from cosmopolitan critics. Indicative of that response is Robert Dale Parker who, in his The Invention of Native American Literature, writes, "Just as I do not find Womack's arguments for essentialism convincing or well informed about critical debates around essentialism, so I cannot abide his implication that non-Native critics cannot contribute helpfully to the discussion of Native American literature." As I have written, I do not read Red on Red (or anything else Womack has produced) this way: rather I see him as saying simply that in reading literature—of any group—one should privilege internal cultural readings. That does not mean that non-Native critics cannot enter the conversation: it simply means that critics—Native and non-Native—are obliged to consider particular tribal perspectives. It was not Womack's implication but Parker's own highly charged inference.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Native American Renaissance by Alan R. Velie, A. Robert Lee. Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction Alan R. Velie A. Robert Lee 3

1 Turning West: Cosmopolitanism and American Indian Literary Nationalism Jace Weaver 16

2 Ethics and Axes: Insider-Outsider Approaches to Native American Literature James Mackay 39

3 N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Myths of the Victim Alan R. Velie 58

4 On the Cutting Edge: Leslie Marmon Silko Rebecca Tillett 74

5 The Use of Myth in James Welch's Novels Alan R. Velie 88

6 "The Event of Distance": James Welch's Place in Space and Time Kathryn W. Shanley 107

7 Gerald Vizenor on Imagination Kathryn Hume 129

8 "One Story Hinging into the Next": The Singular Achievement of Louise Erdrich's Interrelated Novels Connie A. Jacobs 144

9 Thomas King: Shifting Shapes to Tell Another Story Carol Miller 161

10 Thriller Survivance: The Subversive Resistance of Louis Owens Linda Lizut Helstern 174

11 "We've been stuck in place since House Made of Dawn": Sherman Alexie and the Native American Renaissance John Gamber 189

12 A Postmodern Turn Chris LaLonde 207

13 Speak Memory: The Remembrances of Contemporary Native American Poetry A. Robert Lee 227

14 The Re-membered Earth: Place and Displacement in Native American Poetries Kimberly M. Blaeser 244

15 Telling You Now: The Imagination within Modern Native American Autobiography A. Robert Lee 273

16 Theater Renaissance: Resituating the Place of Drama in the Native American Renaissance Gina Valentino 295

17 Reading around the Dotted Line: From the Contact Zones to the Heartlands of First Nations/Canadian Literatures David Stirrup 307

18 Tribal Renaissance Kenneth Lincoln 330

Contributors 353

Index 359