Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape

Four. Talking Back: John Joseph Mathews and Talking to the Moon

The fact that I had lived to see the end of a period in this progression when the exploitation of natural resources of a continent had reached a saturation point, under the berserk methods of economically, socially, and politically liberated Europeans called Americans, was very interesting. — John Joseph Mathews, Talking to the Moon C HAPT E R F O U R Talking Back John Joseph Mathews and Talking to the Moon After his return to Los Angeles from South Dakota in 1931, Luther Standing Bear quickly wrote an essay for the magazine American Mercury and evidently then turned immediately to writing his book Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933). At roughly the same time, Osage writer John Joseph Mathews returned from Los Angeles to his former home on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. He had been “involved with a real estate business” (Wilson, “Osage” 272), but he returned to Pawhuska in 1929, and in 1932 he had his cabin built on the ridges. Born in 1896, Mathews is essentially a generation younger than Standing Bear, but they share similar backgrounds, in a way, and they both became established writers in the 1930s. Mathews authored a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, Wah’KonTah (1932), the novel Sundown (1934), and almost three decades later, a tribal history, The Osages (1961); each book deals with the history and culture of the Osages. Like Standing Bear, Mathews experienced reservation life, went away to school, traveled through Europe, and lived in southern California before returning to his homeland. Mathews, one-eighth Osage himself, was raised at the Osage Agency in Pawhuska, Oklahoma; after schooling at the University of Oklahoma (B.S. in 1920) and Oxford University (receiving a B.A. in natural science in 1923), and after residing in 75 76 Talking Back Geneva, Switzerland, and then Los Angeles, California, he returned to Pawhuska, where he built a stone cabin and lived throughout the 1930s. Both Standing Bear and Mathews have been identified as assimilationists , yet the extent to which this designation applies or how assimilationist beliefs influenced their writings can be argued. In a discussion of the novel Sundown, Louis Owens argues that Mathews “may be in fact the most acculturated of all Indian novelists” (Other 50). In another reading of the same novel, Christopher Schedler suggests Mathews turns from a strictly assimilationist attitude, arguing that the author questions “received traditions ” and instead “experiments with new ways of representing a modern identity” (Schedler 128). As I suggest in the previous chapter, Standing Bear demonstrates an apparent change in attitude between his first and second major books, especially after his visit in 1931 to the reservation of his youth. In this chapter I argue that Mathews too can be seen to vacillate between advocating assimilation and condemning the effects of European American culture on his people. As we have seen, Standing Bear also asserts that he had failed in his effort to assimilate: “I had tried to live a peaceful and happy life, tried to adapt myself and make readjustments to fit the white man’s mode of existence. But I was unsuccessful” (“Tragedy” 273). Similarly, early in Talking to the Moon, Mathews suggests his ambivalence toward assimilation, commenting that he “had wasted some of the best years of [his] life . . . trying to make more comfortable the assimilation of the Osage Indian” (Talking 13–14). It is thus evident that for both writers, assimilation remained a problematical issue. As does Standing Bear, Mathews emphasizes his relationship with the natural world; Mathews is especially interested in the balance of nature on the ridges where he builds his sandstone house. LaVonne Ruoff argues that, like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, Mathews “withdrew from cities to overcome the separation he felt between himself and nature” (Ruoff, “John” 8). When he gets back from his life away from Osage County, Oklahoma —after his service as a pilot in the First World War, his schooling in both Oklahoma and England, his other extended travel abroad (especially in Switzerland and North Africa), and his stint living in Los Angeles—he notes in Talking to the Moon (1945) that he had “lived to see the end of a period in this progression when the exploitation of natural resources of a continent had reached a saturation point, under the berserk methods of Mathews and Talking to the Moon 77 economically, socially, and politically liberated Europeans called Americans...