Writing the Cross Culture: Native Fiction on the White Man's Religion (review)

This collection of short fiction by Native American authors opens with a short piece by Vine Deloria Jr., which is a humorous turning of the tables on academic scholars of American Indian cultures. Carter Revard follows in the same vein with his "Report to the Nation: Claiming Europe," which posits a history in which Native North Americans are the colonizers of Europe, a scenario I always find nearly impossible to entertain given my understanding of American Indians' advanced state of ethical development at the time of contact. Both stories, however, underscore the absurdities of the European literary tropes of savagism and civilization.

From this point, the volume is loosely ordered chronologically, beginning with works published in the early twentieth century. Zitkala-Sa's "The Soft-Hearted Sioux," and E. Pauline Johnson's "As It Was in the Beginning" were both originally published in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Among the earliest Native Americans to write fiction for a Euro-American readership, both authors are highly critical of the bigotries and racism of early Christian missionaries who sought to convert American Indians on the one hand, yet rejected them as fully equal human beings on the other. Given the literary expectations of publishers and readers of the time, it is not surprising that both stories are nuanced versions of the savage versus civilization theme, but I am not sure that the general reader uneducated in Euro-American literary history would grasp fully the ethnocentrism associated with the stereotype of the American Indian as noble savage. I think introductory comments to the stories providing some socio-historical background would have been helpful, not only for general readers but also for instructors who may want to adopt the text for courses in Native American studies.

Likewise, the reader unfamiliar with the history of colonialism, missionization, and the religious and cultural genocide aimed at Native Americans may fail to comprehend the role of Christianity in the social disruption of Indian lives, both historically and in the contemporary situation. Many of the more recently published stories assume the reader's familiarity with the underlying causes of addiction, domestic abuse, and religious polarization that exist among Native peoples today, but it has been my experience in teaching Native American literatures that many students require extensive background knowledge to avoid ethnocentric readings of the texts. I found my own aesthetic appreciation of many of the stories to depend on prior knowledge of such issues. If the book has crossover potential, as the editor claims in his afterword, then perhaps at least a brief critical introduction to the book would have been of benefit in this regard.

The editor's fictionalized afterword, oddly reminiscent of Washington Irving's History of New York (1809), a satire on American religious colonialism in which the Earth is conquered by alien invaders, did little to dispel assumptions of Native Americans as tragic and conquered subjects. James Treat's version, entitled "Inscribing the Wound World: Human Fiction on the Spaceman's Religion," calls the aliens' imposed religion Flagellantism, a name that surely calls into question Native Americans' artful strategies of response to the presence of Christianity in their lives. Although the editor warns that "the attentive reader will recognize that this literary device involves more than a simple substitution of terminology," perhaps the analogy is just too imaginatively "alien" to generate real empathy.

Despite these drawbacks, the text offers much in the way of playful resistance and the subtleties of Native humor. Among my favorites: Basil Johnston's "Secular Revenge," in which Kitug-Aunquot puts one over on the priest who forbids him to eat bologna on Fridays by delivering sawdust to church in place of wood, telling the outraged priest, "Fauder, you say bologney, meat. Okay; den sawdus' is woods"; and Fus Fixico's old-timers ("Letter to the Editor") who play hooky from church because "the best place to be sorry for grafting and to get close to the Great...