TWO TRAGIC NA WRITERS: Louis Owens and Michael Dorris

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.

https://vimeo.com/94255714   

And another for French-speakers (Quebequois?)

https://vimeo.com/60451524  

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.

"SAVAGE SUNSETS" by Adrian C. Louis

My favorite Potawatomi grandfather, who writes poetry and sometimes runs a trap-line and even possibly plays the grand piano, has been a friend since the Nineties when we were on the same listserv and had such a heated exchange that Carter Revard cautioned us.  The other day he sent an exasperated email to this funky old white woman noting that traffic had nearly stopped on the last remaining Native American literature listserv.  NATIVELIT-L@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU   Either there haven’t been any messages for a long time or else I’ve been taken off the list in one of the periodic blood-quantum purges.  (Since I’m zero quantum.)   Or maybe the tech support has collapsed.

My friend wanted to stir things up.  Indeed, everyone is so busy making money or pursuing the finer points of French post-modern philosophy (those French loooove Indians) or hooking up with eager little Ph.D. scholars, that there’s not much interest in speculating about what’s happened to all those great writers we used to know and argue about and with.  I got down my cherished copy of “Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion” (1995, Visible Ink Press)   While I was at it, I looked to see what that press was publishing now.  Sure enough, the NA writers at Visible Ink have been made invisible by Blacks and vampires.

It gets worse:  Adrian C. Louis was not listed in “Smoke Rising.”  He was not the romantic gentle-but-sad Jim Welch, nor an indignant Red Feminist, nor the crowd-pleasing Sherman Alexie (now writing YA novels about masturbation -- very funny, they tell me) nor was he one of the suicides,   But he is closer to the Red Heart of Truth than many of those others.  More than anything else, he is a survivor and that’s a good a definition of what it means to be indigenous.  

There are many strategies for survival, so naturally not all of them conform to expectations.  But those of us who live on or near the big prairie reservations will recognize Adrian’s work.  He’s been able to move around in the disciplines of newspaper editing and university teaching.  Twelve books of poetry, two novels, one of them (“Skins”) made into one of few truly authentic Indian big-screen Hollywood movies.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284494/  His fellow poet, Lee Ann Roripaugh, blurbs:  “A mournful howl and raw elegy, sliced through with the razor-flecked wit of an acerbically world weary jester, Adrian C. Louis’ Savage Sunsets veers between the sacred and the profane, the terrible and the mundane, the lewd and the transcendent in tautly-welded lines that are both searingly elegant and fiercely plainspoken.”  That about covers it.

No need to market Louis as an “Indian."  Anyway, he’s not a bare-chested guy on a horse waving a spear at some buffalo, which is the way people want to see Indians.  Take a look at the reality.  http://www.adrian-c-louis.com/  Other blurbs from James Tate and Sam Hamill.  A vid at http://vimeo.com/45367747  

The people I know best who write like this are white but not among the anointed.  That means nothing.  This is human.  Labels don’t stick.  Except one:  love/grief.  This last collection includes poems of mourning because of the death of Louis’ wife after a decade of Alzheimer’s.  The sound of these poems is not the drum -- it’s the whip.  Also traditional.

When I reviewed an earlier book of poems on this blog  Dec 8, 2006.  (“Adrian Louis’ Strong Brown Wings.”)  and sent him my usual courtesy copy of the post, his response was more or less “I’ll be over to do the honors.  You don’t live that far away.”  A little startling, but that direct response turns up in the poems.  The consequence is a jolting return to rude and preposterous reality.  

Here’s a demo from “Senor Skull’s Parade”:

“Today at work a white girl,

a secretary I like too much

said (half in jest, I hope),

“Do a rain dance.  It’s been

so dry & my tomatoes --”

Yes, do a “rain dance.”

As if . . . As (fucking) if . . 

my blood contained all

azimuths of red arcana

& I could produce such

utilitarian wetness at will;

“I wish I could,” I said, but,

jack-in-the-box Senor Skull

snorted out a snide aside:

Darling, tonight I’m going to 

sneak into your pale garden

&cornhole your tomatoes,

make them wet & juicy

one moaning globe at a time.”

Tomatoes are indigenous, once considered dangerously toxic “love apples.”  But many female readers consider Indian men to be “safe” to romance because they aren’t quite real and there are too many manifestos about frontier white women preferring the red warriors who captured them.  But Adrian is as real as any human in a tractor hat ever gets.  All the politicians are worrying about the “middle class” with never a care for the “working class” -- often indigenous of one sort or another -- that never quite gets ahead.  And yet . . . is never entirely crushed.  Louis is enrolled with the Lovelock [sic] Paiute Tribe which is federally recognized.  It’s in Nevada, but he’s spent most of his working life in South Dakota, sometimes as a teacher of English.

HORSEHIDE

At my martini limit,

I come face to face

with a typically lame

Freshman essay holding

a plenitude of platitudes

in drippy, run-on sentences

that feature tense changes

& ampersands plus a lexicon

of abused or misspelled words.

The kid, mostly silent in class

is rambling about his lifelong

love of baseball & it must be

the ghost of horsehide on

my fingertips that glides,

warps the breaking curve

of a C into an A & then I

slide into bed, safe at home.

If the Dakotas and Nevada don’t teach you survival, teaching freshman English surely will.  The epigraph of Louis’ “Wild Indians & Other Creatures” is from Thomas Merton.  (The Seven Story Mountain.)  

“Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude.

“And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection.  And in that day you will begin to possess the solitude you have so long desired.  And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth.”

Rain on tomatoes is nothing.  Do you agree, Potawatomi grandpa?  (He did.)