Louis Owens
Michael Dorris
TWO TRAGIC NA WRITERS, Louis Owens (1948 - 2002) and Michael Dorris (1945 - 1997), were nothing like each other, except that they were both constant targets in the decade-long Native American literary flame wars during which mostly unknown low-quantum people attacked successful writers who were identified as Native American with low quantums. Maybe the idea was that resentment would make them famous. Or maybe they had some kind of psychological glitch. Actually, they were going by Euro rules invented in the 19th century when the first lists were made.
There is room for the possibility that Owens’ death was an accident. He was shot by his own gun in the parking lot of the airport as he prepared to board a plane. The gun was found on the ground and could have fallen out of the vehicle, somehow accidentally firing as he got out. There is no room for doubt that Dorris committed suicide, which he had repeatedly attempted earlier and finally achieved with pills, alcohol and plastic film. But the tragedies finally made people question what all this bullying and nit-picking about writers was really doing.
Here are two vids about Owens:
A short one produced by the Autry Museum for exhibits.
And another for French-speakers (Quebequois?)
Owens worked as a firefighter and forest ranger before developing a career as much as a professor of writing as of NA studies. He was a Steinbeck expert and on the board of the Steinbeck Quarterly. His novels were tribal rez-based but murder mysteries rather than memoir. He contributed to the 1997 SAIL journal dedicated to Gerald Vizenor. (SAIL, V9, No. 1, Spring, 1997) His Ph.D. was from the U of California, Davis, and he won awards for his teaching. I have friends who knew him well and saw no signs of trouble except for a lot of pressure from commitments. Also, he was a very attractive man, as well as a family man. That can get complicated.
Louise Erdrich
Returning to Dorris, he was a classic American “shattered man,” with a suicidal father he never knew. He was the only boy in a female household, and a bachelor who formally adopted NA fetal alcohol children. The whole thing blew up and probably would have done so much earlier if it hadn’t been for the dedication of Louise Erdrich, his wife, co-writer, and mother of three daughters by him. This pattern is so common among marginal, low income, alcoholic, single-parent, child-abusing families in small town settings that one can find examples everywhere. Erdrich, however, came from a solid family. By the time Dorris ended his life, she had divorced him and had to bear a certain amount of guilt for that. Just after his death, she spoke at Powell’s in Portland. A lot of NA people were there, almost as though it were a memorial. She was clearly agonized and no one was disrespectful.
If a person spends time on a rez, esp. a person who tries to make a difference with kids, stories like that of Dorris repeat over and over. One never gets used to it. They are what happens when consistency and nurturing are destroyed for any reason. Some people get mean about it and attack whomever they can. Others admire the courage of those who succeed in spite of handicaps -- some do -- and work to resist what is most destructive.
Certainly Dorris, for all his damage, got out the message about fetal alcohol syndrome vividly and dynamically. People know NOT to drink during pregnancy. The only way to attack him for this was to claim that he wanted to incarcerate all pregnant women to make sure they didn’t drink. It’s an obvious joke remark, though there are always people who take jokes seriously. There are worse things than being portrayed by Jimmy Smits, but it’s not enough to compensate for the loss of a child. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-02-02/news/tv-1665_1_broken-cord
One wonders what would have happened if these two handsome men -- Owens and Dorris -- had taken a bit more of a defiant punk attitude towards being attacked by people who didn’t think either writer was Indian enough, both the competing writers and the whites trying to curry favor. Since I don’t speak French, I watched Owen’s body language in the panel vid. He clearly had legs too long to fit under a conference table. He would be far more comfortable on a trail outdoors.
In some ways James Welch (1940 - 2003) could be grouped with these two, but he seems to have been protected by his sheltering Missoula context, esp. Richard Hugo and Jim’s wife. He was a drinker. Also I wonder whether his education as a kid in the Minneapolis schools had something to do with it or the steady devotion of his parents, and even his service to the Montana State Parole Board whose “clientele” was predominantly Indian. The French connection also helped him. What other NA writer has a medal from a government?
James Welch Jr.
But I’m always aware that there are many more young men (NA women live in a different dynamic web -- they tend to go with poetry) out there who are brilliant writers but never published because the book industry has done more filtering and ejecting than it has discovering and promoting. They seem to have been entirely dependent on the academic institutions to identify writers, except for a few cases, flukes, and the journalism world.
Indian reservations, like the white communities, swallowed the propaganda of the GI Bill that education was a sure-fire road to success. But the prospective students didn’t always have the necessary basic foundation in things like spelling and math, much less the literary canon. In the tension between individual and group that a writer always wrestles with, the tribe will pull hard for group in spite of writing being a solitary pursuit. There are always needy people at home. Rez politics and federal NA politics are powerful and deadly. Attachment to place and family is another ongoing problem for rez people that whites don’t understand.
Ken Lopez remarks about “Winter in the Blood”: “Welch's first novel is extraordinarily depressing for white readers. My American Indian students at the University of North Dakota, on the other hand, thought it was very funny, which in itself is a lesson in cultural relativism. And they felt that it accurately represented reservation life in the Northern Plains region, which was the land and life most of them knew intimately.” http://www.dancingbadger.com/james_welch.htm
I suspect that the key problem is a mismatch of categories on the part of both young people and institutions. The institutions are still European and some young people now inhabit a world much more like the pre-contact hunter/gatherers. I suspect that the real interface is on the Internet, a “place” where people look for survival and each other, a place that still provides oral culture and honors image as language.
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