WRITING IDENTITY

Because I am white, I have no particular right to address the topic of Native American writing apart from  a fifty-year relationship to the Blackfeet Rez where at intervals I taught high school English and urged everyone to write, including the parents of "Sterling Holy White Mountain".  (I don't know why Sterling uses that pseudonym.)  In the Seventies when the "Native American Renaissance" was reaching its peak, I was in Portland.  Powell's sold the books of the low-quantum authors as remainders, $5 each, and sponsored many readings by them.  I read the books, met the authors, and sent books back to the rez libraries where at least one school librarian hid the books because otherwise, she said, the kids stole them.  (It turned out it was the white teachers who stole them.)

It struck me that most of these NA writers were pretty assimilated which is partly indicated by vocabulary, narrative sequence, character types.  If they weren't, they wouldn't be read, not even by the devoted suburban white moms.

When I was back teaching in Heart Butte, my 7th grade class and I wrote a book:  "One Windy Day."  We did it "writer's room" style as though we were creating a TV series.  That was about 1990.  Halfway through the project, composing a scene where a mother and her daughter are beading at the kitchen table while clothes are thumping in the dryer because tennis shoes are in there, one guy looked up and said with sudden realization, "This is about US!"  Took him weeks to figure it out.  Everyone read as we wrote.  Even the janitor.

I wrote my own book and called it "Heartbreak Butte" which is also online.  The more assimilated Indians hated the title because they were trying to present themselves as "good as anybody" and hated it when they were ever depicted as people with faults.  They drove me out.  They canceled a contract with an Apache outfit, who did drug intervention workshops specifically tailored to rez kids, because the illustrations and examples were not positive.  Their strategy was presentation which is a key to writing about or by Native Americans.  Missionaries teach people how to present themselves.

At a later time I did a bit of research and learned the name of Pokagon, a leader who wrote books, some say with the help of a white woman.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Pokagon  Another early NA writer was Black Elk  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Elk  who was a Lakota convert to Catholicism made famous by a book about him.  These men drew on 19th Century lives that can't be duplicated, but wrote in partnership with white people who had idealistic aims.  That's not duplicated today either unless you count the "adoption" of big shots and movie stars, who are then obligated to be on the right side of politics.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/native-american-literature

"Nineteenth-century Native American literature is a literature of transition, the bridge between an oral tradition that flourished for centuries before the arrival of Europeans and the emergence of contemporary fiction in the 1960s, known as the Native American Renaissance. Unlike the preceding oral tradition, nineteenth-century Native American literature was increasingly text-based and composed in English, the result of missionary schools that taught Indians the skills believed necessary to assimilate into white society."

When Joe Bruchac came to the rez, he was treated badly because no one knew who he was.  An indigenous activist, writer and publisher from Back East, he made enormous contributions to NA writing.  When Sherman Alexie came, everyone was all atwitter because "he makes so much money and MOVIES!"  That's assimilation.  White markers of value and success.  Also, alignment with the music-based alliance across cultures of young people, defiant and obscene, obsessed with sex and gender roles.

It's interesting to speculate that those who identify with being "Indian" as a point of privilege are acting the same as those who use being "white" the same way -- time is eroding the definitions away.  Which makes them both furious.

Obviously, I'm in trouble to say these things.  So I don't usually.  I used to write little stories about Blackfeet and I say what I remember over the last fifty years, but I stopped reviewing books by modern Native Americans.  I don't read them.  It's all politics and the defence of identity in an uncertain world.  A genre to itself.

What I'm interested in pursuing now is the great transformation from an oral culture to a print culture and on beyond that to a video culture.  I've been a "fellow traveler," aware of a group of young men following a leader across this two-step change, which is in part a redemption of ancient ways of expression.  The music came along as well as the Go-Pro restoration of the richness of oral language, the first way people told stories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfT2a5SGDFA  This Thirties vid was made to record sign language, talking that is close to dance, using the "window of expression" presented by face and chest as well as the arms and hands.  There are other examples but this one was made at the same conference as the cast bronze footprints of these speakers still arranged in a circle in front of the Museum of the Plains Indians in Browning.  The conference was one of presentation rather than scholarship.

But print persists and a certain kind of person lives at least partly in words.  Right now the persistence obsession is conscious and the not-entirely-welcome realization that most of what we know and do is quite unconscious, not deliberate at all in spite of all the missionaries and other well-meaning interventions.  We do what we do because that's who we are.