Culturalism and Its Discontents: David Treuer's Native American Fiction: A User's Manual

I

We usually date the beginnings of Native American fiction from John Rollin Ridge's rather odd novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, published in 1854; the first Native American novel by a woman is S. Alice Callahan's Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891). Just after the turn of the twentieth century the body of Native American fiction increased with the appearance of short fiction by Zitkala-Sa, Pauline Johnson, and John Milton Oskison, who would later publish full-length novels in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927 Mourning Dove, aided by or interfered with by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, published Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, a novel she had largely completed by 1916. Also from the 1930s comes fictional work by Francis La Flesche, John Joseph Mathews, and D'Arcy McNickle. Although Ella Cara Deloria had completed her novel Waterlily by 1944, it was not published until 1988.

But it is N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn (1968) and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction it won the following year that, as has again and again been written, initiated a "Native American Renaissance" in literature, an important component of which is the fictional work by Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor that appeared in the first decade after Momaday's Pulitzer.¹ These writers continued to publish fictional work and were soon joined by many more Native novelists. To offer an overview of and an introduction to this by-then-already-substantial body of Native American fiction, Louis Owens, himself a Native American novelist, in 1992 published Other Destinies: Understanding the Native American Novel.

In his introduction Owens argued that for Native American writers "the novel represents a process of reconstruction, of self-discovery, and cultural recovery" (5). And yet, because "the Native American novelist works in a medium for which no close Indian prototype exists," the novel form itself poses difficulties for "the very questions of identity and authenticity the new literature attempts to resolve" (Owens 10, 11). Considering the five-hundred-year-long historical trauma for American Indians marked by the publication date of Owens's book (1492–1992), the near-genocidal, extended colonial assault on indigenous peoples by the Europeans who would become Americans, it is easy to see why it seemed necessary for those who had not "vanished" to consider just exactly what it meant to be culturally and individually Indian in the second half of the twentieth century. The "restless young men" (19), as Robert Dale Parker called them in the fiction of Mathews and McNickle of an earlier period, are reinvented, as Parker further notes, in some of the fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko and Thomas King, and, as I might add, in the fiction of many other Native American writers. There are restless young women, too.²

For many of the protagonists of these writers' work, to return to Owens, the attempt to achieve a positive personal identity had very much to do with cultural recovery. But culture was attended to in a rather different manner by other critics of Native American fiction. In 1981 Simon Ortiz published "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism." As his title makes clear, Ortiz wished to foreground the political dimension of "cultural authenticity" in literature as this was conveyed by the word nationalism. In 1985 Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, with Roger Buffalohead, Beatrice Medicine, and William Willard, founded and herself for long edited the Wicazo Sa Review. Cook-Lynn relentlessly urged Native novelists and their critics to focus on the historical and present-day importance of Native sovereignty. In 1998 Gerald Vizenor in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence made a strong case for Native sovereignty as vested in an ongoing tradition of Native storytelling both oral and written. He, along with others, argued that Native cultural integrity based on the values Vizenor termed continuance and survivance were the strongest underpinnings for American Indian claims to sovereignty.

In 1993 Kimberley Blaeser in...