Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction

Epilogue: All We Have Are Stories: Semiosis and Regeneration

Epilogue All We Have Are Stories: Semiosis and Regeneration I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, yousee, all we have to fight off illness and death.1 A quick glance at a dictionary reveals the common root of the words regenerate and genre: both derive from the Latin, generare. To "generate" is "to produce, or bring into being," while to belong to a "genre" is to be of a certain form or "genus" produced; to "regenerate" is to bring back into being, or to revive,renew, remake. An implicit theory of semiotic "regeneration" and,so to speak, "regenre -ation" has guided my investigation of contemporary American Indian literary works throughout this study. As I have shown, and as many NativeAmerican authors declare outright, Indianliterature frequentlyincludes a ritual or ceremonial dimension aimed at the psycho-spiritual regeneration of the audience. Moreover, I have discussed contemporary NativeAmerican narrative as acrosscultural site replete with lessons for the attentive reader about semiotic practices involved in the ongoing production, or regeneration , of culture in its experiential as well as its textual forms. I have also suggested that during the later years of the twentieth century, the grounds for cross-cultural communication between Indians and non-Indians have become especiallyfertile, and in my 156 Epilogue opening chapters I have credited certain postmodern trends with facilitating the mainstream reader's understanding of Native texts. I would now like to broaden my discussion to speculate about the role that Native American and other ethnic literature seems to play within mainstream culture at the present time. Besides answering the sometimes monotonic, facile demands for "diversity" that we hear so frequently today, the literature of the Other seems to fill an emptiness in mainstream culture. Indeed, Native American authors and numerous mainstream social analysts repeatedly diagnose the present age as spiritually bereft. Anticipating the turn-of-the-century, a large portion of the dominant American society desperately invokes the old American Dream mythology, even as the poor, the homeless, the "post-Boomer" generation, and otherwise seemingly disfranchised sectors declare their alienation almost beyond remedy. Society's leaders call for imaginative,radically innovative solutions to human problems, both domestic and global. Some among them argue that the time has come for western cultures to reconsider the world views of nonwestern peoples whose communal and environmental practices suddenly appear as attractive alternatives to contemporary greed and ecological destruction. Hence, the appeal in recent years of various nonwestern and "marginal" literatures, and the values and worldviewsthey imply. Hence, also, the romanticization and cultural appropriation of indigenous peoples that so many contemporary Native Americans resent. First they stole our lands, say many American Indians, and now they want our lifeways and spiritual practices. Perhaps a less cynicalview of recent developments is possible.As I have suggested in the Prologue, along with postmodernism, some dovetailing trends in western aesthetics and science have created an auspicious environment for the development of "regenerative" texts that I have focused upon in this study. Indeed, much recent increasingly centrist discourse on the physician's "art" affords afascinating intertextual background for a discussion of contemporary Native American storytelling. Native American Medicine and Art We have noted that a conception of art as ritual, specifically as a ritual of healing, underlies many contemporary works of litera- All We Have Are Stories 157 ture by Native Americans. For example, as various critics have explained and as we have observed, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony is not merely about a ceremony—it is a ceremony. The story is not merely about a healing—it is meant to bea healing. Accordingly , this novel, like the Navajo cosmology perfusing it, isformally meticulous; as a ceremony, it is carefully designed to change the participants (both author and reader) and, ultimately, the world, which Silko apparently views to be, like art, a partly divine, partly human creation in a participatory universe. Drawing on Laguna Pueblo and Navajo cosmology together with United States history, Ceremony accounts for the disastrous condition of the post-nuclear, contemporary world by exposing humanity's destructive "story," a semiosic matrix within which human beings define reality and shape destiny. Only a new story, the author insists, can repair the world by altering its currently "monstrous design."2 As a "ceremony" aimed at a general rather than at an exclusively Indian audience, Silko's novel, like...