Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing

Constituting and Preserving Self through Writing

Constituting and Preserving Self through Writing tz;CONSISTENT WITH THE AUTHENTICITY DEBATE, • which seeks to define who is and who is not Indian, individuals who write about themselves have been the topic ofmuch concern. A primary worry has to do with the reliability of the author, based on the assumption that people do not remember events exactly as they occurred. According to Georges Gusdorf, for example, autobiography "does not show us the individual seen from the outside in his visible actions but the person in his inner privacy, not as he was, not as he is, but as he believes and wishes himself to be and to have been." I Gusclorf's statement assumes that events have only single, inherent meanings, rather than several meanings or perhaps no meaning at all, and that meaning is discernible only by certain people. There is the further assumption that the person has no right to see himselfas he believes and wishes himself to be. These are examples of Western-style thinking that attempt to establish correspondence with absolute values, or "truths," that attempt to contain "others" as well as the constantly evolving nature ofreality. For a writer ofAmerican Indian autobiography such as Barney Bush, the application ofabsolute principles translates quickly into an old colonial agenda concerned with things other than truth: 'We Constituting and Preserving Selfthrough Writing [Indians] are exposed at the earliest ages to colonial America's truths, which are truths onlyas long as a group oftheir people have sat, debated, and philosophized long enough to satisfy themselves that this is indeed a profitable truth" (emphasis mine).2 Concern with potentially valuable territory, such as the "legitimacy " of experience, can be articulated in a number of different ways, one ofwhich is Louis Simpson's recollection: "Whatwas I to think ofthe new breed of university professors, structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists , who taught that experience had no meaning, that the only reality was language, one word referring to another, one 'sign' to another, with no stop in any kind of truth? Who put the word 'truth' in quotes?"3 Simpson's remarks, arising from his war experiences, are significant in at least two ways. First, war is probably one of the worst consequences of ideas, as well as the most dramatic illustration of the need to keep ideas grounded in actual experience- those who actually have to fight and die quickly become disenchanted with the idea ofwar. Second , when ideas are grounded in actual experience, certain "truths" do emerge, and they are usually less transcendental than pragmatic. For example, Simpson points out that his wartime experience taught him affection for the so-called common man, taught him to value "The life ofevery day," and most of an taught him his life was his own, to do with as he liked (551-52). Simpsons situation is similar to that of postapocalypse American Indians in many ways, but particularly with regard to dealing with the aftermath ofdestruction. Believing one's life is one's own is important to survivors of destruction, as is believing that one's experiences have meaning. Within a situation where to live is to suffer, where to survive is to find meaning in life, Indian people often are not as interested in abstractions of experience as they are in making some sort of usable sense oftheir lives. Another practical example consists in how many different kinds of information can converge in ways that facilitate interpreting experience into constitution and preservation of identity. Such information often takes the forms ofstories and storytelling, about which Leslie Silko says, "you have this constant ongoing process, working on many different levels ."4 She privileges the pragmatic potential of storytelling, dismissing many concerns about when stories are told, or whether they are history, CAPTURED IN THE MIDDLE fact, or gossip, as not useful at the present time. In her view, what is important is the "telling," the uninterrupted flow of helpful information sent and received. Similarly, within the postapocalypse situation of American Indians, the fact that a person would presume to tell her own stories often (but not always) becomes less important than making sure they are told. Many of the less attractive stories about American Indian experiences are usually avoided, or even suppressed. As a result, it is oftentimes left to individuals who have suffered such experiences to tell them. Robert Warrior has pointed out that, "In the concrete materiality of experience , we see...