The American West in 2000: Essays in Honor of Gerald D. Nash

The Cultural Renaissance in Native American and Celtic Worlds: 1940-2000

In the mid-s a popular American mail-order music company known as Green Linnet issued a well-received album titled The Celts Rise Again. At about the same time,a new talk show,sponsored byAmerican Indian Radio on Satellite, hit the National Public Radio airwaves under the title Native America Calling. In the late fall of ,a -page history of Scotland,The Scottish Nation,–, by T. M. Devine, director of the University of Aberdeen’s Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies,became a best-seller in Scotland and a selection of the American History Book Club. Although these incidents might appear to be isolated, in reality they symbolize a movement that was sweeping across Native America and the Celtic lands of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.A cultural renaissance was running at high tide. Perhaps the shattering of the Soviet Union in  played a role in this movement .As historian J. M. Roberts put it,“The end of the Cold War posed questions of identity throughout eastern Europe; people everywhere looked to the past for clues to who they were.” Elsewhere “countries considered anew how distinctive in their political arrangements ought they to be . . . if Basques were to be distinguished from Spaniards-or the Scotch [sic] andWelsh from the English, or the Northern from the Southern Irish?” This cultural renaissance swept beyond the former Soviet Union and the Celtic Fringe of Europe.It also reached the NorthAmerican continent,where entities like the Navajo Nation,theYakama Indian Nation, and the Crow Nation felt the ramifications of the crumbling of the Soviet monolith. In what appeared to be a global spin-off effect, the Soviet collapse raised universal questions about the historic relationship between dominant cultures—the United Kingdom and the United States—and the cultures that lay within.In some instances this cultural renaissance accompanied the resurgence of various forms of nationalism. The nationalism that emerged during the s, however, was rooted in the rebellious s, when a generation turned against the conservative milieu The Cultural Renaissance in Native American and Celtic Worlds: ‒ Margaret Connell-Szasz   of the cold war era.In the Native American and Celtic worlds,the decade of the s empowered these early cultural stirrings that reflected the dissatisfaction of a people long subjected to outside and internal pressures.This essay will assess the cross-Atlantic links between the Celtic and Native American worlds as each pursued a cultural renaissance mingled with nationalism during the final decades of the twentieth century. Words on the Land N. Scott Momaday, the well-known Kiowa author, writes:“Words, as they are carried from one generation to the other solely by means of the human voice, are sacred.Nothing is so potent as the word;...and nothing is so close to beauty.” In the Celtic and Native American traditions culture has always moved across the generations through the expression of the oral word.The pattern continued with the generations of the late twentieth century. In this manner the poet has recently reemerged as the voice of the cultural renaissance. On both sides of the Atlantic, the people of these sometimes submerged cultures have rebelled against the sterile world of contemporary life by reemphasizing their historic connections with the earth. No Native American nor Gaelic voice has expressed this tie more eloquently than that of the poet.Encapsulating ancient bardic traditions,these poets have restored,through the power of word, the tattered relationship between humans and the earth. It is fitting that their highly respected voices introduce the theme of the cultural renaissance. Among NativeAmericans,Cherokee poet Gladys Cardiff reminds us of earth’s connectedness with her people’s lengthy heritage. Where fire burns in the hollow sycamore smoke like a vague feather lifting up from the island, and the world is cold, where all the animals wait on the river’s edge while Water Spider weaves a tusti bowl, and steals across the waves wherein the little crucible she carries on her back an orange piece of the Thunder’s gift, there all the fires of hearth and harvest, the conflagrations to come, the everlasting fire of the sacred mounds, leap into being.  | NATIVE AMERICAN AND CELTIC WORLDS Across the water in Ireland, Louis MacNeice, born in Ulster but a longtime resident of London, similarly speaks of the pull of his native land that draws the being like an irrepressible magnet. In doggeral and stout let me honour this...