INDIGENOUS WRITERS WHO GO "OFF THE PATH"

Off the Path Vol.2 is, as Adrian Jawort promised, even better than Vol 1.  What really struck me this time was that writers are all young -- I suppose maybe “Millennials” -- and they are totally different than the kids I taught, who were not much younger than myself.  They were “Boomers”, the bulge caused by returning soldiers, and it was a hard time, as much struggling with alcohol and PTSD as now, but without meth, HIV or computers.  "Indians" are not the same from one generation to another.

The most major change is their willingness to just tell it straight, no backing off, not even the obsession with what an indigenous person really is -- how to face the stigma, the ambiguity, the targeting.  The aching for true intimacy is still there, about the same, but the casual sex is taken for granted.  And these characters talk about college, which didn’t turn out to be so hot -- nor the military either.

Reservations are hotbeds of both telling secrets and always hiding the truth.  The forces interlock with each other so that an Indian’s first automatic response is to claim to know nothing.  Then the Stick Game begins.

East Glacier, MT

There are many old rivalries that show up in NA anthologies.  Not across the Pacific Ocean, of course, but within those communities as well as within the Montana tribes -- different styles, different goals.  For people at what used to be the marriageable age, the “Jane Austen” considerations show up more than ever, because the future is on everyone’s minds and the older generations know how much a partner will affect it -- sometimes they demonstrate what not to do at a horrific level as these stories show.  Then what do you do with the love for them.

I’m surprised to see that I know three of these writers’ family names.    Wetzel is an important Montana political name, partly because outstanding basketball players often find they have the name-recognition to make them viable in elections.  I briefly knew Russ Redner when he was in Portland working his way through an AIM case.  

Cut Bank bull riding

The third person is using a pseudonym, but I won’t reveal his true name because that way of thinking is nonsense -- should some urban white reporter track down the true identity of an Indian writer?  As it happens, this individual has more and fancier degrees than any of the other writers, though in my book an MFA is more of a handicap than an advantage.  Still, it was fun to swing around the rez with the story and giggle at the new names he gave the places.  He grew up in one of the three “resort” towns on the rez, which gives him a lot of “attitude.”  He’s mingling with the luxury rich.  Both of his parents come from families with artistic people in them, but they could not have had MFA’s -- not because the resources weren’t there to pay for them but because there was no such degree at that time.

People read fiction because they hope to feel something.  The story can be a way into information and point of view, but the real hope of the reader is to make a strong empathic connection with another human being. The big advantage of autochthonous writers is that they have access to so much strangeness and familiarity at the same time -- which is a great “palette,” to use a painters’ term. 

The "Big Hotel" in East Glacier

Roman a clef means story with a key -- that is, a real life account but fictionalized so that only the people with the “key” know what the real people and events were.  Adrian’s story is an example.  To some people, finding and using that key, like figuring out all the real places in Sterling’s story, is more interesting than participating in the feelings of the character.  But "Blood Sport", his story, is so preoccupied with the abstract issue of blood quantum as is currently obsessing a certain kind and class of young people on the Blackfeet rez that it risks becoming an essay that only uses the characters to explain and defend a political position.  

I have to confess that my whiteman reflection on the issue is far more complex than Sterling’s.  I see that it starts with Columbus thinking that “Indians” were a different species who COULD NOT produce children, and continues on to issues like the medical uses of genomics in pursuing the cause of extreme obesity, the relationship to the foundational Asian genome, how it has been transformed by tribal ecologies, and what vulnerabilities of the People mean in terms of diseases.  

Kristiana Kahakauwila, Hawaii

This last has meant trying to get blood samples from indigenous people to analyze and has aroused realistic fears of exploitation (using this knowledge in copyrighted ways to benefit others, never sharing the profits with the people) and even more fantastic fears of vampirish uses.  Ebola equals smallpox in some minds.  That brings up the unexplored relationship between blacks and Indians, an ambivalence rooted in political power, romantic claims, and the fact that the sheer numbers of urban blacks overpower rural reservation Native Americans.  You see that I’m a bit obsessed myself, but the advantage of a blog is that I can make a separate post.

K. M. Harris, Maori

In short, Sterling’s story might benefit by spinning off some of the politics, keeping only enough to show the impact of the issue on his characters and how it affects their behavior in a race-ambiguous place where the same basic quantum can be an advantage in one place and not down the block, let alone the problem of a family where one sib qualifies for resources and the other one does not -- a sort of Cain and Abel problem.

Cinnamon Spear, Northern Cheyenne

The mating years sustain the plot line of a number of these stories and keep us wanting to understand more.  The same subject can be treated quite differently, so that Wetzel’s rodeo story, an elegant little weaving of bull-riding and exploring the “labyrinth” over by Kalispell into the trope of a “bruised heart” is simple.  But there is enough energy to do some fancy playing with roman a clef sorts of issues -- was the girl at his side as he lay in the dust of the rodeo arena or not?
   

Ellen van Neerven, Queensland, Australia

Kari Lynn Dell, who is also a highly skilled storyteller and a Blackfeet, is not in this collection of stories but has chosen a whole different approach for her novel, using calf roping as her trope for finding a match.  She identifies with the genre of Romances rather than “indigenous writers,” partly because she does not do the “Gothic” or X-rated styles that some Indians and a lot of wannabes use to spice their stories.  She doesn’t do “clown” which a lot of writers have used to deal with drunkenness, poverty and abuse.

In fact, the “clown” makeup is left behind in most of these stories.  They address the misery frankly and let you see their bruised hearts.  This is new and old at once.  It was the break-through that everyone praised in the early Jim Welch stories and then abandoned for the more conventional “Fool’s Crow”, which didn’t press them to think about issues like Sterling’s problem with blood quantum.

Bill Wetzel, Blackfeet

David L. Moore, a professor at the U of Montana, wrote an excellent review of Off the Path Vol I.  You can find at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Off-the-Pass-Press-LLC/656769057706973  A longtime supporter and teacher of Native Americans, he will probably review Vol II as well, though it will be more problematic to think about writers from New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii.  I wish Darrell Kipp were still here, since he knew some of those people pretty well.  (He never passed up a pretty girl!)  They were major reasons for the success of Cuts Wood Blackfeet Immersion School in Browning, because they pioneered so much of the movement and were so gracious in sharing what they knew.

Moore and his wife also discussed the books at http://mtpr.org/post/adrian-jawort-sterling-holy-white-mountain-igniting-fire  Lisa Simon is also a U of M prof.

Sterling Holywhitemountain, Blackfeet (barely)

The reservation can be a trap, but not if people realize it is only a bubble, an illusion that could be left.  There is much more world out there, often interested in making empathic connections with people we so stereotype that we can’t see them anymore.