Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature

4 /Remembering the Earth: N. Scott Momaday’s Nostalgic American Land Ethic

4 / Remembering the Earth: N. Scott Momaday’s Nostalgic American Land Ethic While political radicals of the 1960s and ’70s invoked symbolic Indians to protest the Vietnam War and fuel their “revolutionary identities,” the Red Power movement focused its political energies on issues pertinent to real Indians (Deloria 165). Termination and the Relocation Program of the 1950s and ’60s, which sought to end federal responsibility for tribes and encourage movement to cities, became the latest in a long line of federal legislation that may have been, within a certain assimilationist logic, well-intentioned but that produced negative effects for Native people. Termination meant the loss of tribal sovereignty and, for some tribes, the end of federal recognition and the federally funded services that came with it. Termination targeted tribes like the Menominees and the Klamaths, who were thought to have sufficient resources to sustain themselves without help from the federal government. However, their experiences proved largely negative, and termination was ended by the mid-1960s.1 Meanwhile,theRelocationProgrammovedasmanyas100,000Indians to urban areas but did not generally provide sufficient support for those individuals to face the cultural, geographic and economic challenges involved in the transition. One effect of relocation was the fragmentation of Indian cultures in the name of assimilation. More positively, the greater concentration of Indians in cities facilitated pan-Indian communities and contributed to the period’s rise in political activism.2 Partly in response to these new policies, a host of new organizations, including the widely known American Indian Movement (AIM), emerged to fight for 128 / RECLAIMING NOSTALGIA self-determination. High-profile protests marked the decades: the nineteen –month occupation of Alcatraz Island, “fish-ins” in the Northwest, protests at Mt. Rushmore and Plymouth Rock, the “Trail of Broken Treaties ” and the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building, and the notorious “Wounded Knee II” protest at the Pine Ridge Reservation , which culminated in the unfortunate deaths of several activists and two FBI agents, as well as the controversial imprisonment of Leonard Peltier. The tumultuous civil rights era proved an opportune time for Native Americans to make political strides.3 In addition to garnering greater visibility for Indian issues and renewing interest in “the recovery of Indian cultural identity and homelands,” the Red Power movement had a hand in ending termination policies, prompting the passage of new legislation during the Nixon administration to support self-determination, and helping secure increases to BIA budgets as well as funding for scholarships , drug and alcohol recovery, health care, and other programs (Teuton 4).4 Even with these gains, the popularization of reductive Indian imagery by the counterculture and the environmental movement threatened to obscure both the histories and the ongoing political concerns of Indians. In particular, the environmental movement’s exploitation of the image of Native Americans as uber-environmentalists was usually invoked in connection with a nostalgic, Edenic past that valued nature most when it was unoccupied by any humans, including the country’s indigenous inhabitants. If the environmental movement saw Indians as the quintessential environmentalists, the counterculture was more interested in their “rebel” image, often embracing Indians as symbolic antidotes to an American nation they saw as excessively militant and consumerist. Growing out of both the Beat movement of the late 1950s and the 1960s New Left political organizations, the counterculture was, in Robert Gottlieb’s words, “a disparate collection of social movements, new forms of cultural expression, and semireligious groups and ideas [that] connected the New Left critique of the consumer society and quality-of-life concerns with a desire to go ‘back to the land,’ or at least back to a simpler, more communal, more natural form of social life” (98).5 Like regionalist writers of the 1920s and ’30s, counterculturists were motivated in largely reactionary ways, defining themselves by what they were not, espousing anti-nationalist rhetoric, and sometimes preferring to “drop out” of American society. The counterculture did not fully articulate a cohesive “oppositional politics” but rather offered, at most, “an often unfocused REMEMBERING THE EARTH / 129 search for new values” (Gottlieb 100). In keeping with both postmodern trends and the broad, often vaguely formulated goals of the counterculture movement, “[Indian] identities had power only as the symbols crunched together around an ill-defined, culturally centered notion of rebellion” (Deloria 165). Though not all counterculturists were environmentalists ,6 both groups valued simplicity, often expressed by the idea of getting “back to...