Cristian Titu

Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I

Contemporary American Indian

Literature
PORTFOLIO

Cristian Titu
Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I

CRISTIAN TITU
LEANNE HOWE AND ROXY GORDON
Indian Radio Days
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The thing with this play is , as well, that it has to fight against indifference
and lack of knowledge on the part of some mainstream audiences. When
writing the play, there was the danger that nowadays the Indians might not
still exist. It is a permanent struggle between the need to educate as well to
create meaningful drama.
The play is structured as a radio show, with the narrator interviewing a
floatsam of characters involved in key historical events or the fabrication of
the many stereotypes surrounding American indigenous people.
The way the play develops is light and fast and the tone is kind of ironic,
building as the stranger-than-fiction events of Native American history race
by.
The spontaneity makes its appearance when the public receive bingo cards,
while the audience is listening from time to time to the Rez, reservation,
gossip of a Bingo Lady

ALEXIE SHERMAN
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
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The story emphasizes the potency of humor as a tool to cope with obstacles
that would ordinarily be insurmountable, obstacles like racism or cancer.
The storys title and the discussion of Tonto in the text are the proofs that
Alexie conveys the Native American experience by referring to American
popular culture, while Tonto and the Lone Ranger are considered symbols of
white American and Native American identity.
The two characters seem to work together, but Alexie often envisions them at
odds, even during a fistfight to resolve their conflict and this is important=>
Alexie tries through this to allude to the centuries of historical context that
inform interactions between Native American and white Americans (finally
taking things outside)
The character of Tonto is itself a tool of racial oppression. The Lone Rangers
quiet sidekick, Tonto speaks broken English and has a spiritual connection
with nature, setting them into dated stereotypes about Native Americans.
Even if the text Im discussing appeared a long time ago, such depictions
show that they are able to maintain their influence for decades.
The conclusion is that Alexies work in this story both shows and comments
upon the works of culture that influenced it.

Cristian Titu
Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I

LOUISE ERDRICH
Love Medicine
Chapter 3 Wild Geese
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The chapter tells the story of how Nector and Marie got attracted to each
other. Even if at the beginning of the chapter Nectors feelings are about Lulu,
a sudden altercation with Marie turns into erotism and he now thinks about
Marie.
Nature is predominant in this chapter as the two characters are placed in the
middlfe of the road, in the openness. Weird is that Nector carries two dead
geeses the entire time to pin Marie down, and in the end of the chapter he
offers them to Marie, instead of roses. Moreover, Marie is described in terms
of nature, in connection to nature: pale as birch (tree that doubles back and
springs up, whips singing), she has eyes like a wounded minks, and caws
like a crow.
The fact that this love story takes place in nature is there because this way
their erotic story must be seen as in a broader context. For some this could a
superficially love since he has forgot about his crush on Lulu so quickly but
the way he talks about Marie (as mentioned above) shows that he is actually
paying attention to her. Primal love over lust.

Chapter 7 The Plunge of the Brave

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Water as the main symbol of the chapter that captivates readers attention:
First time occurring the moment Nector poses for the old female artist as
jumping naked off a cliff. The moment is called Plunge of the
Brave=bravery / noble savage. The degradation of this action and the fact
that he is a dead Indian a movie makes Nector to go home.
Its clear that Nectors favourite book is Moby Dick as he often quotes the
famous line Call me Ishmael and he sees himself as Ishmael who escaped
the aggression a great whale. He, himself, is trying to escape from the
females artist picture.
2nd time occurring: The river wasnt done with me yet. I floated thourgh
the calm sweet spots, but somewhere the river branched.
We then see 17 years of Nectors life passing in an instant in connection to
the image of water through a monologue (What they call a lot of water.
Very quickly I would be smoothed away). As water erodes the environment,
Nector himself has been eroded by time who carried him so rapidily that he
wasnt able to notice the things around him (There was less of me). IN other

Cristian Titu
Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I

words time is symbolized by water and when he realizes that time has eroded
him he is motivated to get back in touch with Lulu before its too late.
Water occurs again: their affair (Lulu and Nector): I was full of sinkholes,
shot with rapids. Climbing in her bedroom windows, I rose. I was a flood
that strained bridges.--- Interesting is Nectors transformation via water
terms, and that unlike Marie who holds Nector down, Lulu could run with
me, unfolding in sheets and snaky waves. The lives of the two aling with
each other.
Water again: for the first time in the chapter, water means death (slinece,
cold)=grave, when Nector dives to the bottom of a local lake trying to
drown himself, but water pushes him back up.
Important to notice is that even if Nectors life is engulfed in waters and that
hes reborn out of water the entire chapter takes place during summer and an
opposition between Nectors life and the real world is created. Water vs
conflagration and destruction=> Lulus house is accidentally burnt down by
Nector.

KIMBERLY M. BLAESER
I.
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Returning, remembering, retelling=motion, memory voice

Going for the Rain, A Good Journey, Fight Back: For the Sake of the People,
For the Sake of the Land, From Sand Creek=Ortizs journey in his life>spiritual, cultural, literary, political
Fight Back=literary work intended to be a political statement
A Good Journey=the oral voice of stories, song, history and contemporary
experience
Literary journey of return and remembrance as he poetically recollects and
retells the traditional stories
Fighting back=fightning on, and this is the continuance=carry on the
stories=aspect of Native American life and outlook
After and Before the Lightning=I felt like I was putting together a map of
where I was in the cosmos=metaphors of map and journey
The feel to adapt the ancestral sacred journey patterns and practices to
contemporary and to literary ends
Taking Bearings
Karl Kroeber: The poem he writes in Smoothing the Ground is means by which
psychic energy flows into sociological structure, thence into practical activity
which makes the participants effective in the natural world, provides them
with power
Ortiz: Oral tradition is inclusive, it is the actions, behavior, relationship,
practices, it evokes and expresses a belief system, and it is specific activity
that confirms and conveys that belief
Pilgrimage=preparation, verbal performance, physical enactment, spiritual
transformation, followed again by re-turning and re-telling.
Travel=might in its enactment invoke the long historical tradition of an older
journey, of migrations, of particular subsistence activities, or of harvest
celebration.
The verbal performance=intricate network of relationships, simultaneously
traversing wide ranges of time, experience, and belief.

Cristian Titu
Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I
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Ortiz-> by story or allusive gesture, often engages in a recollection

acknowledging the legacy of loss, and the works to transform that history
through the literary journey of renewal.
- The Holy Grail=the blessing of continuance for a tribe or nation, the privilege
to proceed in the journey, the search, the sacred motion of existence.
II.
Poetic Leavetakings
- Going for the Rain=literal journey in the southern and eastern US and
entwines the telling of that pilgrimage to look for Indians with a ritual going
for the shiwana or rain spirits. =>The Preparation, Leaving, Returning, The
Rain Falls.=>small motions of existence, a woman at loom, planting corn,
giving birth, travel by Greyhound bus, everyday conversations.
- Preparation=mythic context to the ceremonial
- The birth of Ortizs daughter, recalled with prayerfulness.
III.
Traveling Songs
- Going for the Rain=covers much ground=Leaving and Returning, find Ortiz
Passing Through Little Rock, Crossing the Colorado River into Yuma, West of
Ocotillo Wells, Crossing the Georgia Border Into Flodrida, going All the Way to
New York City.
- Political unrest, racist incidents, personal struggle
- The Significance of a Veterans Day=the narrator identifies himself as a
veteran calling for signicance when no one answered
- The final line in Veterans Day reverberates, drawing and subtracting
meaning on several levels.I am talking about how we have been able to
survive isignficance
- Passing through Little Rock->the sense of pilgrimage is strong=>Ortiz voices
his search, his longing for the symbolic rebirth inherent in the ceremonial
reenactment
- East of Tucumcari=the narrator arrives home to see the brown water/falling
from a rock where it fel so good/to touch the green moss and smell/the
northern mountains/in the water.=>the life force of water, the green growth
of moss, and his placement in the northern mountains.
- The Rain Falls = filled with the thirst-quenching waters of Ortizs poetici
vision, with several of the richest poems of the book: The Story of How a Wall
Stands and Dry Root in a Wash, Curly Mustache, 101-Year-Old Navaho Man.
- It Doesnt End of Course-Ortizs text gestures back to the words of the
prologue:The cycle has been traveled; life has beauty and meaning, and it
will continue because life has no end.In words and gesture, the text thus
respeaks itself, as does life.
IV.
Poetic Activism
- Myth and meaning-mythica reality, strong engagement with place, the
influence of orality, the mapping based upon traditional practices, and
especially, the intercessions for historical truth, resistance, and justice
- From Sand Creek=the massacre of 133 peaceful Arapaho and Southern
Cheyenne by the troops of Colonel John Chivington at Sand Creek, COlordao
in 1864, and it links this atrocity to the more generalized domination of
Native peoples in American and to specific narratives of loss.
- Near the end of From Sand Creek: There is an honest and healthy anger
which will raze these walls, and it is the rising of our blood and breath which
will free our muscles, minds, spirits.=> possibility of change here-> The
future will not be mad with loss and waste though the memory will be there;

Cristian Titu
Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I

eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of this nation will mend after
the revolution.
Ortizs volumes=>refuse to whitewash Americas historical culpability, and
yet the conversation they undertake with the reader includes gestures
towards a path of healing or renewal with the reader includes gestures
towards a path of healing or For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the
Land was published in commemoration of the Pueblo Revolt 300 years earlier
in which, Ortiz baldly explains, the people rebelled against theft of land and
resources, slave labor, religious persecution, and unjust tribute demands.
Returning it Back, You Will Go On-> GREED
he exposes the self-interest of the US government in its dealing with the
Native peoples of the region, the governments collusion first with reailroad
interests and later with the mining industry, and exposes the false
justifications of ther actions=>It would be in the national interest, of course,
with the US economy at stake that Indian lands and people, whose affairs
were ruled by the BIA, would be exploited.
Ortiz tries to say through his work that there is hope for change, he has returned to both the ceremonial and the historical pathways of Native peoples,
and in his poetery, re-tells these journeys.

JOY HARJO POETRY

THE WOMAN HANGING FROM THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR WINDOW
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East Chicago, the Indian side of town

Poverty, alchoholism, crime, suicide being the only way out to the young
single mother.
13th floor significance=badluck. Not all buildings have this 13 th floor.
Contrast between the life she knew during her childhood and what shes
experiencing now: Mourning the lost beauty of her own life, she seeks
comfort in the memory of when she ate wild rice on scraped down plates in
warm wood rooms. Now she is surrounded by people who scream out from
below for her to jump.
People screaming out from below for her to jump
Trapped between life and death, isolation, no way to obtain her heritage.
Impossibility to speak (teeth break off at the edges, no means of expressing
herself.
Only way of communicating=suicide
Connection with the American Indians is lost=no way of speaking

Cristian Titu
Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I
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The ending offer the hope that the woman chose to reassert her identity and
to survive by abandoning her suicide attempt, but with the possibility of
letting go of the edge.
Ambiguous ending=the contemporary Native American culture exists on the
edge, between survival and destruction.

REMEMBER
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2nd person you personalizezs the poem, encouraging the reader to assert her
(the author) ability to survive in the modern world.
Remember used repeatedly to emphasize the guidance that the poet
provides. Other symbols: universe, sky, star as Ive seen in her other poems
(The Woman Falling from the Sky, the analysis above, New Orleans etc.)
Sunrise the most important time of day
Mothers: givers of breathe and survival.
Fathers: no life without them
White, red, yellow, black-> colors for all people.
Nature is an important part of life: trees, plants, animal life=> tribes,
families, histories. Theyre seen as alive poems while the wind speaks
and tells the story.
People are connected, no isolation of human being is allowed.
The strongest advice is that nature and the human beings must always be
connected to each other.

NEW ORLEANS
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She speaks of the tribe and her Creek ancestors and their journey down the
MIssisipi to New Orleans
Emphasis on memories, especially in the There are voices buried in the
Mississippi mud ther are stories here made of memory.
Referral to the past and the memories that exist
Exemplification of the oppression of the Creek ancestors that were forced to
leave
not gold => mockery on DeSotos search for gold, she was exaggerating
the fact that gold is not to be found in DeSotos town
An imperative to emrabce and remember our familys history and our roots.
Nostalgia

SHE HAD SOME HORSES

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Horses=spirited creatures, they are magical, they are supposed to

be something else
Singifcant to Native Americans.
Horses are supposed to be a feeling, they are important to her (the
poet) and to her community
Repetition of she had horses=>importance and significance
Joy says that its not about what the poem means, its how the
poem means. It is about how every and each reader is able to

Cristian Titu
Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I
understand the poem and resemble within it. It is more important
how and in connection with what or who someone is able to
understand it.

THE WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY

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Strongly connected to the mythologiy of the Iroquois and Huron of North

American.
The woman in discussion is a primal ancestor and plays a central role in
creation
She lives above the sky. She fells from the sky due to pregnancy or due to the
hole left in the sky by the tree of life
She existed before anyone else
She good twin shaped the sky and created the sun, the moon, stars,
mountains and many plants and animals.
The evil twin set out to destroy the good one, created darkness to drive the
sun from the sky and made monsters, storms, and various kinds of dangerous
beasts.

A CREATION STORY
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Title signifance: defines the act of creation through the stanzas that are to
come
Love->light (happiness)
Stuck between paradise(heaven) and fear(hell)
Shame due to impossibility of leading someone to death correctly
Shame cause people still die and she couldnt do something
Fear is the entity that is able to destroy everything (this house, in danger of
being torn apart)
The act of speaking => creation
Words and songs=> blessing
Stars=>symbol of purity, happiness

A POSTCOLONIAL TALE
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We are born everyday

We are not aware of falling
Our dreams keep us going and alive
We need to fight to be different from the others (in the sack were all the
people of the world. We fought until there was ah ole in the
bag.)=>salvation
Humanity is in connection with nature: The earth and stars, every creature
and leaf imagined with us.
Laugh=indestructibility
Imagination, the weapon of hope and continuity

RECONCILIATION, A PRAYER
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All peoples are relatives of God

Cristian Titu
Contemporary American Indian Literature, AAS I
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I.

The God is both a female and man, a mother and a father, and is responsible
for the good of peoples on this earth, we all live under ITS protection
The Natives land is one of nightmares but also of miracles, and they pray for
a way of not giving it up
Hope is losing (no beginning or end)
Memories in connection with the land revelead in IV.

Part I states that all peoples, nations are Gods relatives. The nations were
created due to Gods loneliness. It is interesting that God here is different
from what we ordinarily know, it is both a woman and a man. We still do
not know for sure if hes a man or a woman.
Nations were created as equal, created from love to love each others (love
us became our loves, sharing tables of food enough for everyone)

II.

The passing of years let the natives naked but with a great history (for the
stories we have of each other). It is both a land of nightmares and one of
miracles. Rich soils, strong community, in harmony with nature, power,
but also of nightmares because the contemporary era is close. The
heritage and the history will live no matter what (the song with no
beginning nor end)- may also say that hope is gone
III.
It is like an imperative to other nations or people to be kind and
understanding and see that such heritage should not be bothered by
contemporary items.
IV.
Part IV presents a life journey from south to west north and east: in the
south a new chance to live and last, west strong belief in God, north
hope is apparently gone, dreams unfulfilled, but the spirit of all that we
love, the land, our people, our history and heritage is back (long lasting)
- It shows how other nations are no more in harmony, that even tough God
created us all as equals and is both our mother and father, sister and brother,
like we all should be for each others that is no longer the case. The natives
are praying for understanding, for reconciliation. THE SPIRIT IS BACK TO US,
scream for returning to the harmony that was in the beginning in order to
preserve a heritage with such great history and beauty.