11 April 2006
“Okay/ go ahead/ laugh if you want to/ but as I tell the story/ it will begin to happen (Silko135).” Storytelling is participating in an act of creation. Storytelling gives birth to new and unique texts that serve as a window through which meaning can be viewed. A story comes alive when it is passed on from one mouth or set of eyes to another and therefore the story’s meanings are as multiple as the those who capture them. As a female Euro-American, with “no stake in First Nation Ideology” (Keenan 179), it may be said I am trespassing in a space where only Indians may enter by attempting to write about Indian identity. My affinity with this topic, however, is not geographical or historical but as complex as the authors I will discuss in this paper. Coming from a European immigrant family, I’ve grown up with the perception that all Americans are natives and I am the cultural outsider. My story in a sense, contrasts the relationship to the homeland that Indians have because outsiders have exiled Indians from the earth that raised them. Our identities parallel one another because we are two examples of an American minority defined by the majority culture and as a result, we tend to be dependant on notions of identity developed or imposed by the outside (Larson 53). In order to unify the identity imposed upon us by the outside and the identity we strive for and internalize, as a minority, an author, a member of a culture must create identity through the ceremonial act of storytelling, therefore Native American Literature, identifies or actualizes the meaning of being Indian. I’ve selected Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, Cloud Chamber by Michael Dorris, and Sherman Alexie’s short story “Assimilation” to demonstrate three examples of Indian identity crystallized through the act of storytelling.
Outsiders distinguish “us” from “them” by sketching cultural boundaries. The very concept of minority is contingent upon the majority. Humans define each other as other in increasingly creative ways. Woman, feminist, neo-feminist, feminist-only-on-the-weekends; as long as moments change, so will those living within them.
But it’s my choice. All this bluff is an act depending on some kind of unstated agreement between us. I make them them, allow them to be them, and in return they make me me. Is it a fair exchange? Without them, their opinions, rules, shocked reactions, free, who would I be? (Dorris 311)
The ambiguous process of defining the other and being defined either by oneself or by another is a hallmark question across Native American Literature as Rayona demonstrates in Cloud Chamber. Leslie Marmon Silko gives an interesting perspective on the act of categorizing humanity through Ceremony. “It was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place” (132). The Indian prophesy which foretold of the white man’s arrival (Nabokov 5) was a theory that immediately came to practice when it was spoken out loud. The words planted the seed for distinguishing and fearing the foreigner, which sets the rhythm for the ongoing battles between “us” versus “them. ”
To make an understatement, the European Americans did beyond their share of identifying, scrutinizing, and destroying the Indians throughout the history of the United States of America. Not only was this process a physical one by means of geographical whitewashing, but it worked on a cognitive level as well. Euro-Americans imposed values and belief systems on Indians consciously or otherwise. For example, reformers attempted to “teach” Indians how to plow and sow the land on which the Plains Indians, specifically, have been tending for centuries (Nabokov 233). Silko gives an example when Tayo receives instruction from white doctors. He is criticized by thinking in terms of “we” and “us” because his individual health will never improve if he doesn’t focus on it. Tayo, on the other hand, wanted to yell at the doctor to tell him that his medicine won’t work because the world doesn’t work in this way (125). According to Gray, to read contemporary Native American novels exemplifies an ideal process of active reading and equally misreading (148). I would argue that reading a culture from an outsider’s perspective is a similar ideal process.
Unfortunately, life happens whether we criticize it or not and historically, the unsympathetic and power-craving Europeans have granted Indians their identities since the word “Indian” escaped Columbus’s mouth. The label “Indian,” “Native American,” and the various politically correct and otherwise terms have survived history and signify thousands of Americans today. To understand oral literature, it is necessary to understand that today’s Indians could be traced back to the time when over 300 different cultural groups, each with a distinct language located north of Mexico when Columbus mistook the Azores for India (Ruoff 327). Anthropologically speaking, the concept of a homogenous Indian culture is false and super-indigenous. With that said, generalizations across Indian groups that distinguish Europe from Native culture can be made, however. One of these generalizations would be the communal lifestyle. Colonization attempted to remove this theory from practice in favor of individuality through a divide and conquer method (Larson 57). The white policy of assimilation like the General Allotment Act of 1887, as Roosevelt eloquently stated, was a “mighty pulverizing engine to break up tribal mass” (57). Clearly the history of identity was growing in complexity during these early times as the sacred communal land was stolen and later reified, measured, and redistributed. The Bureau of Indian Affairs could allot 60 acres of tribal land to the head of the household and 40 to minors, which would remain in their trust for 25 years. Later, the Burke Act of 1906 allowed the land to be transferred to “competent” Indians and the competency commissions were established to determine the degree of Indian-ness, thus the fragmentation of being Indian begins (57). In 1924, Indians, whether they internalize this identity or not, were legally American citizens. However, being too American was later problematic for some tribes. Land-claim lawsuits in the late 60s and 70s proved to be another Indian identity negotiation as the east coast Mashpee tribe was put on trial to determine if they were indeed a tribe and deserved tribal rights to land (53). The case was made that the Mashpee were in fact too American to be Indian as they had been historically surrounded by white culture and had assimilated too much to be considered aboriginal (56). There were no historical archives to “prove” in written form to the American courts that the Mashpee were Indian enough (57).
Words can make a big difference. According to Vizenor in Powell (396) stories are more than a survival, endurance, or response—they have the power to make, remake, or unmake the world. Authors find themselves descendants of Indians, Romanians, immigrants, or colonized peoples by coincidence but through their strategies of “narrative remembering,” they can capture an indigenous identity through transgenerational address (Allen 101). Dorris’ Cloud Chamber works in this way as he traces the history of Rayona all the way back to her familial Irish roots. In a sense, Dorris had conjured Rayona’s ancestor through the “magic of words and names” (103) explicitly when Rayona takes Rose’s name in her naming ceremony. A writer is a scientist as he or she excavates the past through storytelling. A writer also works in a way that resembles the imagination of a child. Powell quotes N. Scott Momaday from The Man Made of Words, “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, that that we are” (399).
Leslie Marmon Silko’s work is an example of identity making. The name of the title is a reflection of the nature of storytelling. Ceremony. Silko takes part in this ceremonial act of naming, of creating an identity through the act of storytelling. “Stories are all we have” (2). As the very first page reminds us how the universe is made. “…and whatever she thinks about/ appears./…She thought of her sisters,/…and together they created the Universe/ this world/ and the four worlds below./ Thought-Woman, the spider,/ named things and/ as she named them/ they appeared.” This opening poem frames the rest of the story and, I argue, speaks to the ceremony of writing and creating identity through the means of storytelling. If the primary goal of the United States was to destroy the “Indian” and the memory of it, good advice could have been aim towards their mouths (Powell 402).
An argument against the notion of identity writing could be argued from a postmodern perspective. According to Harvey from The Conditions of Postmodernity, anything written has its own life as a text because it conveys meaning, unintended or predictable by the author. The more readers means the more readings, therefore we can never say what we mean (49). So writing one’s identity could be just writing a farce according to Harvey because words cannot capture a single being or one unite identity.
It’s shouldn’t come as a surprise to scholars of Native American Literature who find identity searching as a common aesthetic across the board. Harvey discusses the present situation in respect to identity. The postmodern character is confused by the very world in which they live and how to react or respond to it. The “labyrinth of selves” inspires a struggle to unify the forgotten past, the bewildering today, and the unpredictable future (41). The multiple local struggles for liberation occur across the postmodern landscape for Havey, and to universalize “Indian” or “Indian Literature” would be an absolutely illegitimate master discourse (47). Momaday might fall under the postmodernists as Harvey discusses as exemplified in his 1970 address to the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars (oddly enough), quoted in Allen, “An Indian is an idea a given man has of himself” (98). In this statement, Momaday seems to admit that being Indian is a personal self-idealization and to talk about a universal “Indian” might be an over simplified and false genetic narrative.
Whether identifying the Indian is false or a severe oversimplification, Native American Scholarly works thrive as more Native Americans writers perpetuate the discipline. The western storyteller is in a unique position as the outsider looking back into his or herself and the systems surrounding them. Silko distinguishes the tradition Indian way of communal storytelling, “Stories about the Creation and Emergence of human beings and animals into this World continue to be retold each ear for four days and hour nights during the winter solstice… Traditionally, everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest person, was expected to listen and be able to recall or tell a portion if only a small detail, from the narrative account or story. Thus the remembering and retelling were a communal process. Even if a key figure, an elder who knew much more then the others, were to die unexpectedly, the system would remain intact.” The individuals die out but the story is immortal. According to Gray, being Native American today means either metaphorically or literally being a mix blood (148). This can be seen within the discipline of Native American Literature. Unlike the communal storytelling process Silko describes, authors have assimilated into Western forms of writing. Being Native American takes on a new meaning as one who of American identity and Native identity simultaneously as though to form a third autonomous identity.
Mary Lynn in Alexie’s “Assimilation” struggles with these competing ideals: being Indian as a separate identity as being upper-middle class American. In the end of the story, Alexie writes about this dramatic experience where Mary Lynn looks at her husband from across a bridge and realizes she loves her marriage for its structure and stability. Mary Lynn’s problems come from the ideal identities she thinks she should have internalized. She operates completely on stereotypes. Her failed attempts to be “Indian” are exemplified in the beginning of the story as she hastily seeks out an Indian looking stranger to have casual sex with. When she suspects that the dependable and boring life that sparks this rash attempt to become Indian is in danger, Mary Lynn calls the whole Indian thing off and decides to hide her affair from her husband. She is seduced by the ideals while keeping them at a distance. Mary Lynn cannot identify herself with her husband’s white upper middle class world, nor is she Indian enough. Mary Lynn, like many of the characters in Alexie’s book, is in this vague in-between space of identity. Not a part of the whole, but one of those who don’t quite belong. Assimilation is impossible for these characters.
Mary Lynn and her husband were not in love with each other because they spited the ideals associated with the other but loved the ideals of the marriage institution. Storytelling is the bridge between Mary Lynn and her husband and the bridge between two contradicting identities. “The boundless capacity of language which, through storytelling, brings us together, despite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time” (Gray 148). Another example of characters suffering from identidy idealization is Rocky in Ceremony. Rocky is the only full blooded Indian in the book and he disguises this identity by cladding his body in the American soldier uniform only to suffer a horrific death as a result of enlisting. The war ends and so does the respect for Indians (42). Like Mary Lynn, Rocky functioned on idealistic stereotypes of being a respectable soldier.
Tayo is an example of this third autonomous identity. Not only is he literally mixed blood, but he suffers from discrimination in both Indian and American worlds. Even his own family discriminates against Tayo as the product of his mom and “that white man” (30). Krupat distinguishes Native American Literature as that which results from interaction of local, internal, traditional, tribal or “Indian” literary modes with the dominant literary modes of the various nation-states in which it may appear (214).
Colonization set this process of change in Native American literature as authors were forced to create a new space between Indian and American culture (Larson 60). “Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things” (Silko 126). As U.S. policy attempted to destroy Indians, they acted more as a catalyst for the flourishing Native American Literature discipline as authors picked up their pens, participated in the storytelling ceremony, and created the simultaneously Indian and American individual and community. “The destroyer will try to stop you from completing the ceremony” (125), thus the destroyer is not the American Government or the European Colonizer, the destroyer is silence.
Alexie, Sherman. The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.
Allen, Chadwick. “Blood (and) Memory.” American Literature 71(1999): 93-116.
Celi, Ana. “The heritage of stories: a tradition of wisdom.” American Studies International 40(2002): 57.
Dorris, Michael. Cloud Chamber. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1997.
Gray, James. “Mediating Narratives of American Indian Identity.” Contemporary Literature 39(1998): 146-154.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1990.
Keenan, Deirdre. “Trespassing Native Ground: American Indian Studies and Problems of Non-Native Work.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 33(2000): 179-189.
Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkley: University of California Press, 1989.
Larson, Sidner. “Native American Aesthetics: An Attitude of Relationship.” MELUS 17(1992): 53-67.
Nabokov, Peter. Native American Testimony. New York: Penguin Group, 1999.
Powell, Malea. “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing.” College Composition and Communication 53(2002): 396-434.
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. “American Indian Oral Literatures.” American Quarterly 33(1981): 327-338.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: The Viking Press, 1977.
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