Storyteller : Leslie Marmon Silko's Reappropriation of Native American History and Identity

"We live forever in stories, not manners," he teased a newspaper reporter last year. "So, tease the chance of conception, tease your mother, tease the privy councils of the great spirit, and always tease your own history."

–Almost Gegaa Browne

Gerald Vizenor's character Almost Browne, in Hotline Healers,¹ reveals something of the quandary faced by the American Indian oral historian. Although his version of the truth is marginalized by the dominance of another language and the literary conventions of the bearer of that foreign language, he "has never been . . . a coach of victimry. The traces of his native ancestors are always tricky, but never tragic" (1). He challenges the purveyors of the discourses of Euro-American domination—the journalist, the anthropologist, the university professor, the judge—to "tease" their own history. Almost recognizes that, for the American Indian, the conventions of Euro-American genres dictate that the story can only be told one way, and that way is as oppressive to the Indian mind and spirit as social and political dominance. Almost recognizes that "tricky stories are the sovereignty of motion and creation, never the dead letters of cultural inventions, or the classy causes, tragic closures, and motivations of discoverers" (5). The solution to the dilemma for Almost Gegaa Browne is to subvert the conventions of Euro-American letters with the blank page. He sells his Wiigwaas Trade Books, the brand name of his empty books, at the local university, and he never has enough of them for curious students, who are told by Almost that "the best stories were heard in the absence of printed words" (25). When he is arrested by the university police and charged with "consumer fraud, false advertising, and conducting a commercial business on state property without a license," Professor Monte Franzgomery, who had danced around Almost's bookmobile "to the sound of shaman drums," pays the fine. According to the professor, Almost's blank books "were a source of inspiration . . . a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'"(27). Professor Franzgomery, for all of his goodwill, is perhaps an all-too-familiar representative of the academic sphere, ever willing to romanticize and exoticize the Native presence, to "dance to the sound of shaman drums," and yet to celebrate the blank page of the Native voice in print.

Vizenor, like other American Indian writers who draw upon the oral traditions of their communities to inscribe their histories and identities, is of course "teasing history," pointing to the ironies of Native Americans' limited access to the production of culture. Control over the discourses and images of the Native American has, from the historical moment of contact, been in the hands of European and Euro-American elites. Non-Indian anthropologists, folklorists, and historians have for many years been those who determine what is and isn't authentically American Indian and/or worthy of serious academic regard; the courts of the United States have determined how much (or rather, how little) of indigenous Americans' oral traditions can legitimately be recognized and protected as "religion"; American journalists have perpetually sensationalized the image of the Native American; and today, practitioners of New Age pseudo-Indian religions have appropriated and misconstrued Native traditions, romanticizing and trivializing the songs, prayers, and practices that American Indians have for centuries relied on for their very survival.

What is perhaps even more troubling for American Indian writers and scholars, proficient in writing the English language, are the constraints imposed by Euro-American epistemological assumptions and the conventions of the literary genres that reflect and sustain them. Fredric Jameson points to the role of genre in "master narratives," which perpetuate ideologies through the chronologies and the predetermined endings of their plots. According to Jameson, "a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or, in other terms that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right."² As Native American writers and academics have entered the spheres of cultural production in American society, they have discovered that telling the story according to their own cultural aesthetic conventions has led them into contested territory...