All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature

Introduction: Toward a Postpopulist Criticism

INTRODUCTION Toward a Postpopulist Criticism As even a casual scholar of Montana writing will note, the production of fine writing far outstrips the critical inquiry into the state’s extraordinary literary corpus. If a handful of Montana writers such as Richard Hugo, A. B. Guthrie Jr.,D’Arcy McNickle,Wallace Stegner,and especially James Welch have received considerable and diverse critical attention, there remain sizable gaps in the analysis of the state’s ever-growing and ever-evolving canon. All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature seeks, therefore, not only to build on the exemplary, foundational work of William Bevis, Ken Egan Jr., Sue Hart, Rick Newby, Julia Watson, and others, but also to open further interpretative and critical conversations. Building on the critical paradigms of the past and bringing to bear some of the latest developments in literary and cultural studies, the contributors raise questions and foreground issues that have not been widely addressed in the study of Montana literature, explore the work of writers who have not received their critical due, take new looks at old friends, and offer some of the first explorations of recent works by wellestablished artists.However,before turning to a brief analysis of what has been perhaps the dominant paradigm in Montana scholarship—call it the“populist tradition”—and the contributors’particular celebrations of and challenges to this tradition via their analyses of gender and genre; desire, masculinity, and queerness; history (and the unreliability of history) and identity; region and desire; place and poetry; and much more, a brief overview of the Big Sky’s literary tradition will help stake the territory. As the bookshelf of Montana writing reveals, the state possesses not only a vibrant contemporary literary scene (reaching from the Yaak to Yellowstone, from the Bitterroot to the High Line), but also a rich and diverse tradition reaching back, as Welch puts it, to “a long time ago” (3). If the publishing of Montana writing began in the 1860s, the poet-novelist reminds us that Native American stories and myths come to us from a far deeper past, from the memories and oral traditions of the Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow, Flathead, GrosVentre, Kutenai, and Pend d’Oreille of Montana:“How far back x Introduction do these stories go? All the way to creation—of the heavens,earth,the birds and animals, the mountains and streams, the humans”(3). Stories and storytelling seem as much a part of Montana as its mountains, forests, rivers, and sweeping plains, and the voices have been many: Indian and Euro-American, female and male, gay and straight, poor and wealthy, civilian and military, truth-teller and scoundrel. Moreover, Montana writers have excelled in about every genre: epistle, diary, journal, screenplay, poem, short story, novel, western, adventure, mystery, memoir, column, essay, article, history, polemic, jeremiad, screed, bald-faced lie, and still others. In fact, Montana boasts such a long and diverse literary tradition that the bookshelf looks, the closer one investigates, more and more like a well-stocked library. From Blackfeet and Salish creation stories to the poetry and novels of Welch and Debra Magpie Earling, from the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the memoirs of Mary Clearman Blew and Judy Blunt, and from the semifictions of Thomas J. Dimsdale and Yellowstone Kelly to the stories, novellas, and masterworks of Mildred Walker, Norman Maclean, and Richard Ford, the canon of Montana writing includes some of the best-known and most celebrated works about the American West. Some of the most famous— and infamous—chroniclers of westward expansion and the conflicts between Indians and whites, for example, were born and raised in Montana or wrote about their experiences as explorers,sojourners,trappers,settlers,or soldiers in the territory. The oral narratives and tales of George Bird Grinnell, Mourning Dove, Plenty-coups, Pretty-shield, and Two-Leggings, among others, provide insight into diverse Indian experiences and beliefs, and while some eloquently describe tribal cultures, histories, and cosmologies, others angrily recount the encroachment and violence of Euro-Americans.On the other hand,E.C.“Teddy Blue” Abbott, Nannie T. Alderson, Andrew Garcia, Luther S. “Yellowstone” Kelly, and Frank B. Linderman offer detailed accounts of their adventures and lives among Indians, fur traders, farmers, and ranchers. Indian or white, their works remain some of the most widely read and studied accounts of life in the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the days of loss, broken treaties, tough trips...