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A Critical view of Native American Literature and its significance

Conference Paper · December 2015

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.2183.9446

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 A Critical view of Native American Literature and its significance
Mr. Simhachalam Thamarana (Research Scholar),
Dept. of English
ANDHRA UNIVERSITY
INDIA
thamarana.simhachalam@gmail.com

Abstract:
A brief introduction to Native American literature is to be given at the outset. Then the
indication of the words ‘Native American’ and ‘Native American Literature’ along with the
origin and development of Native American literatures have to be examined. Various
prominent Native Americans have produced much poetry and prose. From ancient times until
late in the nineteenth century, their literature existed only as an unwritten and anonymous
oral tradition. Much later, anthropologists and linguists tried to convert the anonymous
tradition into a written literature that preserves the spirit of the original. Thus, today Native
Americans are writing poems and prose fiction that carry forward the creative work that
reaches back in a continuous line to its ancient beginnings. For the Native Americans,
language was so magical. They used it in various songs, spells, and charms to control their
world. Usually the songs were chanted to make rain and to assure a profuse harvest, charms
to cure sickness and ease pain, spells to overcome an enemy, win a reluctant lover. The
language that Native Americans used invoked the spirits of the sky, the earth and the winds.
Their prose stories were short tales of their human origins, of their heroes or admired
tricksters, of visitations by their gods, or of prophecy. Since language was held in high
esteem, eloquence was a quality necessary for leadership. Until recent times, their only
elevated language of recorded authorship was that of native rulers’ in negotiations with the
white man. Most dominant themes are ‘resentment of betrayal’, ‘grief over the destruction of
their culture’, and ‘the humiliation of defeat’ etc. Finally the conclusions are drawn by means
of the review of literature indicated.

Key Words: Native American Literature, Magical language, Supernatural Elements, Elevated
language, Cultural destruction.
Introduction to Native American Literature:

Native American literature begins with the oral traditions in the hundreds of
indigenous cultures of North America and finds its fullness in all aspects of written literature
as well. Until the last several decades, however, Native American literature has primarily
been studied for its ethnographic interest. A fruitful intellectual discussion of the place of
Native American literature within global literary study – a discussion that includes Native
American intellectuals, artists, and writers themselves – only began during the activist period
of the 1960s and 1970s. Native American literature, also called Indian literature or American
Indian literature, the traditional oral and written literatures of the indigenous peoples of the
Americas. These include ancient hieroglyphic and pictographic writings of Middle America
as well as an extensive set of folktales, myths, and oral histories that were transmitted for
centuries by storytellers and that live on in the language works of many contemporary
American Indian writers. For a further discussion of the literature of the Americas produced
in the period after European contact Native American literature is somewhat of an oxymoron,
since the actual literature came from Puritan settlers documenting stories and performances of
Native Americans. Native Americans were not educated and were, certainly, not literate of
the English language when the Puritans arrived. Native American literature is nothing more
than the Puritan's perspective of the stories told by the “Indians”. Puritan settlers watched
performances and ceremonies then wrote what they believed to be the message being relayed.
Native Americans passed tribal information and legends from generation to generation using
ceremonies and performances since they didn't have any written language to document tribal
history.
The first Native American literary texts were offered orally, and they link the earth-
surface people with the plants and animals, the rivers and rocks, and all things believed
significant in the life of America’s first people. Some of the Native American literature has
many elements of bildungsroman literature, as “the term bildungsroman is applied to many
novels of all times. 5 Though it is not a dominant genre; it has a universal appeal because it deals
with the universal experience of growing up or coming of the age” (page 25). The texts tie
Indian people to the earth and its life through a spiritual kinship with the living and dead
relatives of Native Americans. Coyote, raven, fox, hawk, turtle, rabbit and other animal
characters in the stories are considered by many Native Americans to be their relatives. In the
same way, the Plant People are related to Indian people. Oak, maple, pine, cedar, fir, corn,
squash, berries and roots are viewed as relatives. The ‘animal people’ and ‘plant people’
participated in a history before and after the arrival of humans, and this history was kept
through the spoken word. There was a similar relationship with the geographical features of
the earth.

Mostly, telling a story and writing a story, even if they are the same story,
remembered from generation to generation, are not the same way of preserving the story. The
teller and the writer use different faculties of mind, and have different habits and disciplines
of language, memory, tradition. Each has a different responsibility to the story, and to the
listener or the page. The teller’s relationship to the story and the listener, both at once, is
direct. The writer wrestles with the page, with the story, in solitude. Native American
literature is comprised of a collection of oral and written works that express the history,
philosophy and culture of any one of the different groups of indigenous peoples of North and
South America. The literature of Native Americans, as in other culture, is an expression of
how one sees the world and one's role in it. In the Native American culture, particularly, there
is a strong inclination to mesh the life of the individual with the greater cycles of nature and
the greater powers believed to be responsible for creating and sustaining the world.
 The language, imagery and metaphor used by Native Americans so transcended
earthly obstacles to preserve the culture. The stories are inherently spiritual, shrouded in
symbols from nature: plants, and animals, earth and sky, fire and water. Oppositions in nature
are often used to emphasize mutualism rather than antagonism. There are several themes
found in Native American literature. One common theme is the characterization of the
American nation, a particularly troublesome topic given the history of colonization in North
America and the disparity in justice and equality for many Native Americans. The essence of
what makes one a Native American, as opposed to just native, is an elusive concept to
express. The notion of nationhood in general was a foreign concept.

Another topic of interest in Native American literature is the concept of personal

identity and definition. Again the struggle between the external view and the internal view is
stressed. The question of exactly who is classified as Native American is a controversial
subject since classifications vary based on the criteria. People are classified by their family,
their community or the government, and labels are distributed: “full-bloods” and “half-
bloods” or even “one-fourths” and “one-eighths.” More than merely a genetic categorization,
a person is generally considered who they are by cultural, linguistic and religious standards.
Ultimately racial definitions are inadequate, and it is one's way of life that predominates in
identification. As Native American writer Geary Hobson states, “A person is judged as
Native American because of how he or she views the world, his views about land, home,
family, culture, etc.”

The history of literature written in English by American Indians parallels the history
of white migration across the continent. White exploration and settlement were followed by
the arrival of missionaries who converted Indians to Christianity and educated them in
religious schools. The first novel published by a Native American was The Life and
Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854) by John Rollin Ridge, son of the highly respected
Cherokee leader John Ridge. Ridge chose to deal indirectly with the injustices suffered by
Indians by focusing on the Mexican folk hero Murieta – a social outcast who defeats his
enemies by using both his keen mind and blazing pistols. The first Native American novel
devoted to the subject of Indian life is Queen of the Woods (1899) by Simon Pokagon.
Pokagon was determined to educate a white audience about traditional Potawatomi life before
the coming of whites and about the tragic changes in this life suffered by the people after
whites dispossessed them and debauched them with alcohol.

For many Native Americans the turn of the century marked their dispossession of
ancestral lands, the nadir of the populations, and confinement to reservations. Fearful that
their oral the traditions would disappear forever as the tribal communities became more and
more fragmented under the demoralizing conditions of reservation life, some native
Americans began to write down the legends and folktales of their tribes, as well as their own
personal narratives, in an effort to preserve their history and culture for posterity. Writing
became a means to perpetuate tradition in the face of cultural disintegration.

Some characteristics of Native American Literature:

Native American literature often features a combination of oral storytelling techniques and
tribal mythology with European literary forms such as the novel or short story. Many works
of Native American literature are strongly rooted in myth and symbolic archetypes. Some
representative writers as of the early 21st century include Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie
and Leslie Marmon Silko.
(a) Hero Initiation: One recurring motif in Native American literature is that of 5 “the young
man who undergoes ritual initiation and eventually accomplishes a heroic act similar to many
protagonists does in bildungsroman” (page 25). Often the young man is born under divine
circumstances or has mixed parentage. Neither he fully belongs to his native tribe nor to the
European settler world and must prove himself by some daring feat. In the end, the hero often
dies tragically and becomes revered by those of his tribe.

(b) Trickster: Another common motif is that of the trickster. For the Lakota tribe, for
instance, the trickster is represented by the spider. For the Kiowa, it's embodied by the
coyote. The trickster may be a foolish figure who reveals human avarice. Often the trickster's
selfish or mean-spirited actions result in being punished. Although the trickster may hurt
others or act wrongly, it is nonetheless regarded as a cultural hero in tribal stories.
(c) Symbolic Landmarks and Mythology: Another characteristic of Native American
literature involves attributing human characteristics to landmark formations or inanimate
objects. This is part of a more generalized anthropomorphic tendency in Native American
folk traditions. Additionally, animals may be given human behavioural characteristics such as
greed or jealousy. Inanimate objects and animals may be accorded an equal place with
humans in the cosmos, and this equality emerges in Native American literature.

(d) Oral Tradition: Much Native American literature is rooted in the vitality of the oral
tradition. Thus, many novels or poems may incorporate storytelling techniques such as song
or repetition. The novels of M. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko use techniques
often associated with oral storytelling. Native American poetry especially shares many of
these characteristics and may even be written for performance and involve instruments and
refrains.

Indian oral literature in plains includes literary expressions from cultures as different
as Blackfeet (North-western Montana) are from Kiowa (Southern Plains). By far,
autobiographies comprise the bulk of written literary materials. During the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century’s, academics mostly anthropologists and historians–took up the
idea that Native testimony or life stories needed to be preserved. Many believed that Native
Americans were disappearing and with them their languages and histories; great efforts
needed to be made to preserve cultural histories and literatures in writing. While many Native
Americans wrote their own autobiographies during this period, many more had their life
stories recorded as “as-told-to” autobiographies by anthropologists, ethnographers, and
“Indian buffs.” Plains Indian life stories, particularly those of warriors and chiefs, were so
plentiful that they became a genre unto themselves.

Many European literary genres such as poetry and fiction, for the most part, began
being employed by Native American people in the nineteenth century. John Rollin Ridge
(Cherokee) wrote the first Native American novel in English, The Life and Adventures of
Joaquin Murieta (1854). The most famous Plains Indian writer is N. Scott Momaday
(Kiowa), whose first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), won the Pulitzer Prize for literature
in 1969. The Way to Rainy Mountain, the autobiography he published a year later, traces his
journey from the mountains of Montana to Rainy Mountain in Oklahoma, the path Kiowa
people followed as their culture was transformed through acquisition of the Tai-Me, the Sun
Dance medicine bundle. Momaday's influence since the 1960s cannot be underestimated;
through his writing, he created a new voice and a new place for Native American writers in
the American imagination.

The epoch of awakening, dubbed the Native American Renaissance by literary critic
Kenneth Lincoln, witnessed the production of many new Indian texts after Momaday's
influential novel and autobiographical memoir, including works by Leslie Marmon Silko
(Laguna), Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), and Ray Young Bear (Mesquaki) as well as poetry
by Roberta Hill (Oneida), Duane Niatum (Klallam), Joy Harjo (Creek), and Wendy Rose
(Hopi-Miwok), and others. James Welch, a Plains writer of Blackfeet and Gros Ventre
heritage, has been and remains prominent among Native American writers, with five novels,
one book of poetry, and a nonfictional book on the Indian point of view of the Battle of the
Little Bighorn.

The substantial amount of writing by Native Americans now enables the identification
of clusters of work based on genre, tribal affiliation, geography, theme, style, gender, and
sexual preference. The blossoming of nonfictional essay writing and literary criticism by
Natives themselves bodes well for the future study of Native American literature. Most
notable among contemporary essayists is Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow-Creek-Dakota); her
collection Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner (1996) hits at crucial contemporary Native
American struggles, challenges, and grievances in tough-minded and bold terms. Although
primarily a poet and fiction writer, Cook-Lynn presents “a tribal voice” (the subtitle of the
text) that cannot be ignored. Most importantly, Native American literature owes its existence
to continuing and vibrant oral traditions.

Native American Literary Genres:

 Origin and Emergence Stories – example -our tribe was born when the mother bear
gave birth to her cubs, we are the cubs of mother bear etc.
 Cultural Hero Stories-explains methods of tribe, explains actions.
 Historical Narratives-used to relay stories, legends, history of tribe.
 Trickster Tales-used fictitious character to break rules generally proving or disproving
tribal rules.

Other topics prevalent in 20th century Native American literature range from assimilation to
apocalypticism. Native American assimilation and cultural transformation arose as a direct
result of European immigration and Christian evangelism, with Indian boarding schools
established as early as 1879 in the attempt to bring Native Americans into Western society.
Native American resistance, through religious and cultural movements, has historically led to
repercussions as evidenced by the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890). The sentiment behind
the movements was often echoed in Native American writing in the first half of the 20th
century.

The Native American Renaissance also highlighted a theme that would characterize much
contemporary Native American literature: that of the alienated male protagonist who returns
to his reservation after living alone in the dominant society, and finds himself caught between
two worlds as he searches for a viable identity. More recently, writers and critics have tried
to move beyond the conflict between tradition and assimilation that characterizes much
writing of the Native American Renaissance. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Thomas King,
Greg Sarris, and Gerald Vizenor utilize postmodern strategies and themes such as hybridity
and fragmentation in order to explore new possibilities for Native American identity. A
debate has ensued over the benefits and drawbacks of maintaining a more separatist,
nationalistic Native identity versus emphasizing a hybrid, “mixed” identity that fuses
elements of Native and mainstream cultures.

Most dominant themes in Contemporary Native American Literature:

Respect for nature and all creatures, tribal unity, respect and love for each god, community
(every member of the tribe had a specific job and function within the tribe), understanding of
how each member contributed to the well being of the tribe, women held in high regard-
considered spiritual leaders within the tribe (which is why the women were responsible for
the farming-if the gods were pleased with the women's spiritual leadership and divinity-the
gods would provide a bountiful harvest.

 A post-apocalyptic sense of life: after near extinction and destruction, Native American
writers often convey a sense that the apocalypse, or end of the world, has already
occurred.
 Tragic defeat and cultural destruction associated with the myth of the “vanishing Indian”.
 Survival and continuance by adapting old stories and customs to new circumstances.
 A sense of being caught between traditional tribal ways and modern, mainstream
American society.
 A sense of community and a communal sense of identity, based on notions of kinship and
interdependence.
 The power of language and stories to shape identity, both individual and collective.
 A sense of the interconnectedness of all things, focusing on relationships between
animals, land, people, and language.
 An acute awareness of the loss of ancestral homelands or “the presence of absence”;
place, self, and community are so intimately linked that the loss of land is a loss of
psychic strength.
 A focus on specific places as opposed to “lighting out for the territory” and migrating to
new frontiers.
 A response to Euro-American stereotypes of savagery and primitivism, and to romantic
notions of the ecological and spiritual wisdom of Native peoples.

Conclusion:

In fact, as the Native American writers have produced much poetry and prose that carry
forward the creative work that reaches back in a continuous line to its ancient beginnings. As
the Native Americans used magical language in various songs, spells, and charms to control
their world, usually the songs were chanted to make rain and to assure a profuse harvest,
charms to cure sickness and ease pain, spells to overcome an enemy, win a reluctant lover.
The language that Native Americans used invoked the spirits of the sky, the earth and the
winds. Their prose stories were short tales of their human origins, of their heroes or admired
tricksters, of visitations by their gods, or of prophecy. Since language was held in high
esteem, eloquence was a quality necessary for leadership. Until recent times, their only
elevated language of recorded authorship was that of native rulers’ in negotiations with the
white man. Most dominant themes are ‘resentment of betrayal’, ‘grief over the destruction of
their culture’, and ‘the humiliation of defeat’ etc.
 References:

1. Bloom, Harold. Native American Writers. New ed. New York: Bloom's Literary
Criticism, 2010. Print
2. Otfinoski, Steven. Native American Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 2010. Print.
3. Fulford, Tim. Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and
Transatlantic Culture, 1756-1830. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.
4. Porter, Joy. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.
5. Simhachalam, Thamarana. “Origin and Development of Bildungsroman Novel in
English Literature.” International Journal of English Language, Literature and
Humanities (August issue, 2015): 21-26. Print.
6. Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native
American Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.
7. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction,
Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: Modern Language
Association, 1999.Print.
8. Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and
Course Designs. New York: Modern Language Association, 1983. Print.

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