Plastic Indian: A Collection of Stories and Other Writings by Robert J. Conley (review)

i can’t confirm that I’ve read all of Robert J. Conley’s eighty-six published books, but I may have. Conley (1940–2014), a Cherokee Nation citizen, was a writer who excelled in multiple genres, including not only Cherokee literature and history but also Western genre fiction, poetry, nonfiction, critical essays, and works for the stage. I wrote a chapter of Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature on Conley’s sweeping, ten-volume Real People series of interlinked Cherokee historical novels. Beginning before European contact and ending with the story of Dragging Canoe in the late 1700s, the series chronicles Cherokee life through generations of characters. Like most of Conley’s fiction, these novels are plot driven and action oriented, with their complexity centered less on the internal psychological condition of individual characters and more on how characters and their communities navigate through a dynamically changing Cherokee world. While popular with the Cherokee community, Conley’s fiction may not readily fit the aesthetic expectations that too often have come to define Native American literature worthy of critical study. That may account for the dearth of critical engagement with Conley’s writings, which is a shame, as Conley published more books than any other American Indian writer, and he lived within and wrote for the Cherokee community.

Plastic Indian: A Collection of Stories and Other Writings is a posthumous collection of stories, a play, and speeches edited by Evelyn L. Conley, Conley’s widow. She writes, “In this collection of writings, Conley provides insight into the lives of Cherokees, detailing experiences that allow us to observe the kinds of everyday situations that have been part of the ongoing journey of what it means to be Cherokee” (xi). Following the foreword by Geary Hobson and the editor’s preface, the book consists of an introduction and sections titled “Cherokee Tales,” “A Short Radio Play from James Mooney,” “The Cowboy Westerns,” and “Speeches Delivered by Robert J. Conley.”

Hallmarks of Conley’s style appear in the title story, “Plastic Indian,” featuring three friends and their outrage at a hulking, pink, nearly naked insult to Cherokee nationhood that stands in front of a motel outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma: “We had driven past it dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times, the giant plastic Indian that stood in front of the motel on Highway 51, and we had almost always cussed it as we went by” (7). The plastic Indian had become “a symbol of all that was wrong and all that was evil in our midst,” standing on land that, before Oklahoma statehood in 1907, “was owned by all Cherokees” (7). A critique of settler colonialism and Native stereotyping flows into a darkly humorous tale of how a night of summer drinking finds the friends attempting to pull the plastic Indian down with a truck.

Plastic Indian also features western stories with lawmen and outlaws of the type that Conley was known for and that earned him several Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America (WWA), as well as the 2014 Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement by the WWA. Geary Hobson notes in his foreword that Conley was a student of the Old West, and his realistic westerns are “nothing like the so-called shoot- ’em-ups that tend to stand as the definition of the genre” (ix). His depiction of life in the Cherokee Nation in the second half of the nineteenth century is particularly complex. His writing was groundbreaking, as it expanded the western genre to include Cherokee and American Indian protagonists. In fact, his first novel, Back to Malachi (1986), features Cherokee culture hero Ned Christie. In Plastic Indian, Cherokee lawmen work to keep order in the Cherokee Nation from American criminals escaping U.S. law. Defiant, ironic, humorous, sometimes violent, and squarely grounded in a Cherokee setting, the stories in Plastic Indian reflect some of the key topics in Conley’s work...