Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology and the Ethnic Subjectivity of N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday rejects the label “Indian writer”: “I don’t know what that means. I am an Indian, and I am a writer, but I just don’t want to say ‘Indian writer’ or talk about Indian literature. . . . I don’t identify with it at all.”¹ Momaday further asserts that he never has and never will allow himself to become a spokesman for “the Indian,” preferring instead to be seen as a mainstream writer with a distinguishing ethnic heritage.² Since his debut in the late 1960s, Momaday has been received by most of his critics as an ethnic storyteller who, in deftly combining tribal mythologies and Euro-American lore, demonstrates the versatility of an imagination that can role-play the West’s master discourses while maintaining the integrity of a Native American heritage.³ What these commentators do not consider is the extent to which Momaday’s representation of his Native American identity draws from powerful frontier archetypes that have framed the way white Americans conceive ethnicity.

Werner Sollors argues that the concept of ethnicity in the United States is a semiotic intent to mark boundaries between what are actually shifting components of external (voluntary) and inherited identification.⁴ Americans honor ethnicity when it is achieved, or chosen, rather than bequeathed; in the national imagination, this choice generally involves dissent from one group representing outmoded, inherited convention and integration into another representing a new consensual order. Under the ideology of consensus, an American ethnic subject may decide what to appropriate from an ancestral heritage. For Native Americans, however, colonial deracination has left sizable gaps in a cultural history marked by the intercession of external powers intent on destroying tribal traditions. The insistently hermeneutical materials of culture are thus made more complex by a genealogical burden. Many Native Americans, moreover, believe that the articulation of their cultural identities involves reimagining as much as it does rediscovery. Despite the popular belief in a changeless Indian consciousness, Native Americans have had to “reinvent the viable conditions of being Indian,” which involves acquiring knowledge of their descent and imaginatively filling the gaps in this knowledge.⁵ Questions of how to integrate traditional ideas and beliefs with the modern mainstream—without producing a monolithic, abstract notion of tradition that confines Native Americans to terms of descent—have been at the fore of discussions.

In this regard, Momaday’s representation of what it means to recover Indian roots reflects a problem of identity many Native Americans face. Momaday’s Kiowa identity, he claims, is considerably self-fashioned, involving the negotiation of indigenous and “external” elements, which Sollors describes as American ethnicity’s basic rhetorical structure. Drawing from many sources, Momaday has reinvented the Kiowa out of his readings in ethnographic history, his memories of his grandmother’s and his father’s stories, his contact with Kiowa living on reservations, and, not least significant, the myths of the American frontier.⁶ While the Native side of Momaday’s cultural dialogue has been discussed at length by others, only cursory attention has been granted to relevant American Western archetypes that have influenced Momaday’s personal mythmaking. While these mainstream sources may be read as “external,” in the sense that they are not indigenous to American Indian cultures, they must not be treated as secondary to Momaday’s imaginary. To argue, as Louis Owens does, that frontier figures like Billy the Kid in The Ancient Child are appropriated strictly for parody is to presume that the dimensions of Native and non-Native and of Indian and American are more clearly separated in Momaday’s voice than his work manifests (OD, 118–122). In fact, Momaday’s recovery of his Kiowa Indian ancestry has been both facilitated and frustrated by American frontier myths that have disturbed him since his youth; the resulting dialectic in his work registers his contention with the ways the...