NA RENAISSANCE READINGS

NA Renaissance readings were all over Portland in the Seventies, but mostly in the downtown Powell's.  Since then readings are not so important, but at the time it was what was done.  Everyone was much younger then.

Greg Sarris, so handsome, spoke in the Gay bookstore. He was orphaned, adopted, highly educated (an English professor for a while) and chief of the Miwoks, the model for the Ewoks in "Star Wars."  He's approaching sixty by now.

Elizabeth Cook came early to the Hawthorne street Powells, a little funkier and more anthro than the downtown store.  We visited for half-an-hour.  She too was highly educated, a professor, and very elegant.  I remember her with a shawl.

Louise Erdrich came to Powells downtown with a crowd three times the norm.  It must have been later because it was just after Michael Dorris had died and she walked wrapped in grief as though it were a blanket.  The people, mostly indigenous, were silent and respectful.

It must have been about that time that Vine Deloria Jr. came but he spoke at the City Club as part of a luncheon.  I couldn't afford the lunch and wasn't a member anyway, but they let non-members come to sit in chairs to the side.  It was a time when women wore dresses and black stockings with black patent leather heels.  Deloria had been to Powells and bought a big picture book of the Spanish Inquisition.  His talk was about how savage white men were to use the torture machines illustrated in the book.  It was vivid and some of the younger women left early.  I was sitting with indigenous street people who were hugely enjoying themselves.

Louis Owens was another college professor but he never spoke. I knew a member of his close circle who were still trying to fathom his death.  He was in the car park of the airport, supposedly leaving to give a speech, when he was found in his pickup shot dead.  His gun was there.  It was never resolved whether it was an accident or a suicide.

Janet Campbell Hale had been born too dark to please her family and suffered for it, but she was a direct descendent of Dr. John McLoughlin and his tribal wife, a McKay,  For decades he was nearly the king of the Willamette Valley.  His quite elegant house is in Oregon City where it can be visited.

Sid Larson, Jim Welch's cousin, organized a kind of festival in Eugene, OR, where he was a prof.  I attended.  Joy Harjo played her sax.  N. Scott Momaday was there, rumbling with stories.  I kept in touch by mail with Sid for a while.  Jimmy Welch's father was Bob Scriver's boyhood best friend and Jimmy himself was always friendly.

Ed Edmo was a Unitarian Universalist with his white wife. He was local. In fact, he said the Columbia Highway was built right through the location of his childhood bedroom.

Canadians counted as local to us.  Adolf and Beverly Hungry Wolf were local, almost, often in Browning in summer.  Adolf is white, Beverly is Blackfoot.  Hugh Dempsey (white married to a Blackfoot) stopped by the shop and we stopped by Dempsey's work space in Calgary.  

Richard Lancaster (white) was a madman who locked onto "Old Jim" Whitecalf and wrote a book.  Bob would lock the door if he saw him coming.

When Ivan Doig (white) came to speak, I chided him for not writing about Blackfeet since as a boy he helped herd sheep near Heart Butte.  He didn't write about Metis, either, but only the Scots immigrants of his imagined family.  We both attended NU at the same but he wouldn't talk to me.  We hadn't known each other.  I visited with his wife.

RezNet was a whole other scene, a "bulletin board" that included Sherman Alexie until he got mad and left.  But that's a long story.

What I'm trying to convey is that NA writers were a loose company of people, several kinds, mostly well-educated.  The rivalries of today's lit scene just weren't there, at least not where I could see them.  They were not "old-time" Indians unless you count Percy Bullchild whom I never met, though I taught many of his relatives.  Woody Kipp was always around, but he was another prof and journalist.

These people are grouped as the "Second Wave" of Native American Literature.  I don't know any "Third Wave" people but maybe we're already on the Fourth Wave.  Politics have become so hostile and separated that there are no ways to meet them.  A Potawatomi poet grandfather told me "we don't write for white men anymore -- we write for each other."  There's no money or real fame in it.