Writing Indian, Native Conversations (review)

“Conversations” is an accurate announcement for this study of contemporary American Indian fiction. John Purdy writes in a direct conversational style, free of jargon and heavy on civility. His book is a demonstration of what he and Louis Owens agreed on in an interview: “[S]cholarship and academic writing need not be contentious” (221). In part this civility is expressed by his insistence that his approach to criticism be taken as a motion “toward” conclusions, “a journey, a process, rather than the conclusive, definitive word” (viii) or a “terminal creed,” to borrow Gerald Vizenor’s term. The keystone of Purdy’s civility is an openness, even an insistence, on the need for diverse approaches to studying Native writing. Nowhere is this more evident than in his brief introduction. On two facing pages he respectfully evokes the names of Charles Larson, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, Jace Weaver, Michael Dorris, David Truer, James Cox, Elvira Pulitano, Arnold Krupat, Louis Owens, and Paula Gunn Allen (viii–ix). I tried to imagine all these scholar-critics in a room together; there would be some rather heated exchanges and long, tense silences. Purdy’s point isn’t that diverse speakers should all agree, but that they should all have a say: “[I]f it is otherwise, the discourse [on Native literatures] is dead” (ix).

I wish another appropriate word had appeared in the title—“collected,” not because I enjoy alliteration (Collected Conversations), but because that addition would give readers a better understanding of the nature of the book. As the acknowledgments pages indicate (253–54), most of Writing Indian consists of twelve of Purdy’s previously published articles in revised form (1986–2006, and one forthcoming when this book was in press) and five interviews (Allen, Ortiz, Vizenor, Alexie, and Owens).¹ There are certainly practical and intellectual advantages to collected essays, especially in this case since several of these essays appeared in European volumes that may be difficult to access in print or online, and more especially because of Purdy’s significant roles as long-serving, past editor of SAIL, as someone with extensive contacts with contemporary authors, and as a scholar-editor still actively promoting the developments of contemporary American Indian literature with his online journal Native Literatures: Generations.

Gatherings of revised essays invite two obvious evaluative questions: are some of the essays out of date and are there enough unifying elements to transform a collection into a “book”? The subchapters on House Made of Dawn and Ceremony, originally appearing in 1997 and 1986, respectively, struck me as a bit outdated: the former’s key argument about the disastrous results of attempting to confront and destroy evil directly and alone, instead of acknowledging its unending presence and acting in community, was stated eloquently in Larry Evers’ 1977 Western American Literature article “Words and Place”; and the significant connections between Tayo’s narrative and Laguna oral narratives, especially convergence/emergence patterns, are well known. Still both subsections will be valuable introductions to newcomers to the field, and Purdy’s provocative pairing of Auntie’s story of Tayo’s mother’s naked and inebriated appearance at dawn and Tayo’s sighting of a Ka’t’sina at dawn is still original.

Although Purdy is careful not to promise a survey of contemporary Native fiction, the primary structural unifying element is chronological, and indeed this organization does offer a sense of development of books, authors, and significant events, especially the 1977 NEH Flagstaff Seminar and the 1992 Returning the Gift gathering. Chapter 1, “The 1970s,” includes an interview with Paula Gunn Allen and readings of House Made of Dawn, The Death of Jim Loney, and Ceremony. Allen’s comments about the danger of Native literature being pigeonholed as ethnic literature in the “Oppressed People’s Garden” still resonates today (5).

Purdy frames chapter 2, “The 1980s,” with Ortiz and Vizenor interviews; his analyses focus on Fools Crow, Winter in the Blood, and Erdrich’s first five North Dakota Saga...