Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash and the Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature

In November 2007 Sherman Alexie won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature with his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This event might have prompted scholars to attend to other Indigenous-authored young adult (ya) texts and to examine the possibilities of the ya genre for Indigenous writers. Yet, several years after True Diary’s debut, this area of scholarship remains scant. In fact, there are currently few articles and no book-length studies exclusively devoted to Indigenous-authored ya literature. Scholars, moreover, have not yet substantially explored questions about what Indigenous authors have to off er to the ya genre or what the genre has to off er to Indigenous literature. This essay, along with the larger project from which it is drawn, begins remedying these oversights.

My work builds on that of Doris Seale, Beverly Slapin, Paulette Molin, Clare Bradford, and Debbie Reese. These scholars provide broad analytical surveys of texts by both non-Indigenous and Indigenous authors who represent Indigenous characters in books for young readers.¹ By critiquing stereotypes and colonialist perspectives in texts by non-Native writers—including award-winning texts commonly integrated into school curricula—and by promoting texts that offer accurate nuanced representations of Native people, these scholars make crucial contributions for K–12 education and popular culture, as well as for Children’s/ya literary studies. By focusing exclusively on Native-authored young adult texts and theorizing their unique approach to Native sovereignty and to the ya genre, I aim to move this area of study into a more fully realized subfield of both Indigenous studies and children’s/ya literary studies.

Reading slash as ya

Much ink has been spilled in debates over the definition of young adult literature. The American Library Association (ala) defines “adolescent literature” as encompassing three categories, which Sheila Schwartz summarizes as “Books Written Specifically for Adolescents,” “Books Written for General Trade Market Which Have Adolescent Heroes and Heroines,” and “General Books of Interest to Young Adults” (Schwartz qtd. in Trites, Disturbing 7). While recognizing that other scholars use the ya label for texts that match any of the ala’s criteria for adolescent literature, Roberta Trites, a leading scholar in the field, limits the young adult literature designation to texts specifically targeting adolescents (Disturbing 7; “Introduction” 2–3). As Trites explains in her landmark study Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, literary historians mark the emergence of ya literature as a distinctive genre in the mid-twentieth century: in 1942 with the publication of Seventeenth Summer, in 1951 with The Catcher in the Rye, and in 1967 with The Outsiders (9). While Trites and other critics recognize the market-driven subjective nature of the ya label—and, to a certain extent, the category of “adolescence” itself—they also identify common characteristics of texts in the genre: these works tend to represent the latest speech patterns and consumer trends, they inevitably face censorship as a result of portraying realistic adolescent behavior, and they focus on young characters who rebel and mature as they come of age (Hunt 5–6; Trites, Disturbing 9–20). Trites makes an influential case in Disturbing the Universe that “Young Adult literature has exploded as an institution in the postmodern era because although it affirms modernity’s belief in the power of the individual … it very self-consciously problematizes the relationship of the individual to the institutions that construct her or his subjectivity” (20). ya novels thus stand apart from both adult and children’s texts, Trites argues, through their emphasis on power negotiations between individuals and social institutions even more so than through their focus on adolescent growth (Disturbing 20).

Earlier Indigenous writers—from E. Pauline Johnson and Charles Alexander (Ohiyesa) Eastman to D’Arcy McNickle and Virginia Driving Hawk Sneeve—certainly published texts that appealed to young adults, but Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 Slash was the first novel by an American Indian or Canadian Aboriginal author written expressly for a teen readership and thereby falling under Trites...