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A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Press
- Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 23, Number 2, 2002
- pp. 3-6
- 10.1353/fro.2002.0016
- Article
- Additional Information
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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23.2 (2002) 3-6
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A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Press
Paula Gunn Allen
As an American Indian writer, the writing experience can be a strange one. I guess that although Indians have been "out of sight" of the general American social scene for so long, we are not "out of mind," as the saying goes, but have become fertile ground for all sorts of amazing fantasies.
And while this fanciful Indian of the imagination is useful for movies, advertisements, and New Age money making, it is pretty weird when one writes from real life. I mean, when you're a Native American writer, the people who read your stuff have all kinds of astonishing ideas in their heads that they bring to the page. It's like they open the book, smear each page liberally with opaque goo, and then proceed to read their projection of what they think the Indian writer wrote.
Evidently, if you are identified as something other than mainstream culture it is assumed that you don't live in the regular world. To some extent, that's true. Indian Country is a place where all kinds of events transpire, assumptions are made, and facts are commonly known that are unlike those known in other parts of America. For instance, most Native American people know what the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is. Most know that there are many different kinds of Indians, though most use the word Indian, to mean their own kind whether they are Chocktaw, Chippewa, Seneca, Pomo, or one of hundreds of other nations.
But while there are many differences between Indian America and mainstream America, the popular non-Indian American idea of life among modern American Indians is pretty weird. Contrary to popular imaginings, Native Americans of today seldom wear buckskins, ride horses, live in tipis, talk to animals, possess spirit guides, go on vision quests, or engage in "soul walking." None I know of are at war with cowboys. Since most of the cowboys I knoware Indians, the liberal-progressive belief that cowboys are those who oppress and destroy Native people is a bit strange. It's true that most Native people are [End Page 3] devout Christians, and that most can't afford many of the neat Indian things—jewelry, art, rugs, blankets, and clothes that are popularly thought of as "Indian." Most speak English as their first and only language, and at least two-thirds live in urban and suburban communities a large part of the time. Many have no idea what their "tradition" is or might have been, nor do they think of their modernity as a tragedy. Few are radical activists engaged in continuing protest against the governments of the United States, Canada, or of any other European nation.
Nevertheless, anything we write is interpreted as exotica, often as anti-white, radical agitprop exotica. In other words, if it is Indian, it wears feathers, plays the drum, celebrates the earth, lives in perfect harmony, and is profoundly noble and tragic. It is necessarily anti-white, angry, rebellious, traitorous, fundamentally illiterate, heathen, and impoverished. And from the publishing and academic communities, if it's Indian, it isn't worth considering as literary; no, we're talking special market—New Age, folklore or fantasy stuff, not real literature! Nor are we allowed to write from more than one perspective. For example, since I am identified as a Native American writer, anything I write must be concerned completely and solely with Native issues or concerns. When the Sioux metaphysician and scholar Vine Deloria Jr. tried to publish work on general religious and metaphysical subjects, he couldn't find a publisher. After all, he was a prominentAmerican Indian writer, not a member of a university's religious studies or philosophy department. You know, in a country as vast as the United States, as varied and geographically, geologically, biologically, climatically, historically, politically, religiously, linguistically, and time-zone-ly diverse, American readers can sure be small-minded...