Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (review)

To survive on this globe, it has become clear that we must achieve a transition from egocentrism to ecocentrism. More and more we will be required to read across lines of cultural identity around us and within us. It is not easy but it is necessary, and the rewards are immeasurable. Finally, it is quite clearly the only way the community we call life will survive. (11)

These words resonate throughout this challenging and provocative book written by Louis Owens, who is a literature professor at the University of New Mexico. Mixedblood Messages focuses on questions of Native American identity in literature and film, particularly as seen through the lens of the author's own experience with his multiracial background (Owens' multiracial background includes Choctaw, Cherokee, Cajun French, Irish, and possibly Welsh, ancestry). However, Owens' rendering of autobiographical experiences in Mixedblood Messages has a deeper purpose and meaning. As the author moves through his personal odyssey in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he demonstrates how family and place have informed his personal experience and identity, as well as the experience of Native Americans and the writing of American Indian literature. He also simultaneously challenges all humans to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of individual and collective survival.

Owens warns humans that they must shift from their self-centered relationship with the natural environment--which originated in the modern worldview--to an ecologically-centered one, before they destroy the natural environment and thus destroy themselves. Correspondingly, the author calls upon all individuals to explore and share their realities with each other by "cross-writing" and "cross-reading"; that is to say, to communicate across cultural boundaries. Owens argues that this would create a middle ground, or liminal space, which would enable individuals to join forces and share their various realities with each other. More important, it is a necessary tool for survival in our increasingly global and postmodern world.

Mixedblood Messages provides an excellent introduction to and overview of the Native American experience and literary canon, as well as to the problems inherent in giving them a respectful and fully conscious "cross-reading." Owens seeks to revise the ways scholars and students typically read and analyze Native American literature, and does not shy away from the controversy and complexities involved in this task. He unflinchingly explores such issues as the value and applicability of mainstream literary theory to analyzing Native American texts, the offensive use of romanticized stereotypes of American Indians in order to market literary texts to mainstream audiences, and the ways in which static assumptions about "full-bloods" and authentic "Indianness" continue to distort the rendering of contemporary American Indian life and the reading of contemporary Native American literature.

Mixedblood Messages consists of sixteen beautifully written, thoughtful, and at times humorous essays. Several have been published separately over the past few years, but appear in revised form in this book. As the subtitle indicates, the book is divided into four parts, focusing first on literature and then film, moving on to several autobiographical essays, and concluding with several essays on the environment. In the preface, Owens describes his book as structurally and stylistically "eclectic." This hybridity is a metaphor for the book's underlying goal, which is to illuminate the meaning of "mixedblood" personally, intellectually, and theoretically. It is also reflective of Owens' general questioning of the arbitrariness of categories and boundaries--racial or otherwise.

Owens' main vehicle for exploring these issues is to challenge readers to question standards by which they judge "authentically" Native American literature and determine who has license to relate the Native American narrative: only "full-blooded" reservation-raised Indians, or anyone with Native American ancestry? Owens himself has been accused of being an "urban Indian," and therefore not a credible spokesperson for American Indians, by virtue of his multiracial background, identity, and...