Writing Indian, Native Conversations (review)

Dialogic in voice, John Lloyd Purdy’s Writing Indian, Native Conversations offers a thirty-year retrospective on the field of indigenous literary studies from its earliest formations into the present day. Combining transcribed interviews with the field’s most distinguished writers, close readings of essential novels, and Purdy’s own inter-leaved interpretations, the volume offers thoughtful interpretive pauses astride the on-going conversations he held as the former editor of Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL) with Paula Gunn Allen, Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and Louis Owens.

Given these writers’ diverse viewpoints about their craft and roles, Purdy achieves remarkable cohesion concerning when and where field consciousness emerged (in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1977), its most salient characteristics, and where it is headed. With so much ground to cover, the aim of the book is not so much schematic as integrative, tending toward an interpretive dynamic Purdy calls DIAC: differentiation, investigation, affirmation, and continuation (xvi). The acronym is perhaps too tidy, but the focus capably delimits the field and its various voices.

Purdy’s unobtrusive approach holds its own in distinguished company because, from the outset, it is crystal clear that the book is not garden-variety theorizing about Very Important Indians (VIIs) held apart from classroom and community practice. The phrases “my students,” “questions from the students,” and “in response to the students” echo throughout the book, reminding principals to the conversation and readers alike where the real focus of the future lies. The interplay among interviews, criticism, and implied student-readers creates the kinetic, storytelling medium—the give-and-take of a field in motion rather than the settling out of hard-line stances—that Purdy is arguing for on behalf of a living critical practice.

Purdy’s long reach and memory also make his book important for specialists. Writing Indian, Native Conversations restores largely overlooked early anthologies (by Joseph Bruchac, Geary Hobson, Kenneth Rosen) to their rightful place in the literary history of the early formation of indigenous studies. In its reading of novels by Thomas King and D’Arcy McNickle alongside films by Victor Masayesva Jr., Gerald Vizenor, and Sherman Alexie, the book also neatly cues the increasing convergence of otherwise distinctly different techniques within the intersecting domains of indigenous film and literary studies. Whatever the text, Purdy persuades when arguing for common artistic ground—a sophisticated textual practice united by a common cause.

Yet Writing Indian, Native Conversations also welcomes the uninitiated and conveys standard material with fresh relevance and energy, an approach best conveyed in Purdy’s important analysis of McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936). This novel provides “a recognition of an on-going cultural lifeway. … [The tight focus] also marks a shifting in the audience’s interpretive lens, for we are curiously situated for translating Archilde’s intuitive recording” (235). Intuitive, shifting, translational: John Lloyd Purdy’s Writing Indian, Native Conversations offers the best witness to date of the historical foundations of the field of indigenous literary studies, rebuilt anew with each passing decade. Most important, it honors its readers, whether they are rooted in sovereignty or merely respectful visitors passing through.