Nasdijj and Jordan Abel Remixing William S. Burroughs: Considering the Legacy of Beat Generation Writings in Twenty-First Century Indigenous Literature

Abstract

Nasdijj and Jordan Abel Remixing William S. BurroughsConsidering the Legacy of Beat Generation Writings in Twenty-First Century Indigenous Literature James Mackay (bio) and Polina Mackay (bio) In 1981, Leslie Marmon Silko published her essay “An Old-Time Indian Attack Conducted in Two Parts” in Geary Hobson’s landmark Native collection The Remembered Earth. One of the few direct contemporary responses by a Native American writer to the use of sacred stories and materials by Beat Generation poets, Silko begins with the 1960’s fad for composing Indian poems by writers as disparate as William Eastlake, Louis Simpson, and Jerome Rothenburg, arguing that each is profiting from sacred songs which were taken by ethnographers without permission, and that these songs should be repatriated in much the same way as religious objects and other property. Simpson, the product of exactly the same environment as Allen Ginsberg for all that they are usually seen as opposed, comes in for special disapprobation for his statement that “to write about Indians you should in a sense become an Indian” (qtd. in Silko 212). Silko’s anger is clear here in that her normally well-constructed sentences suddenly lose their verbs: “Again, the unmitigated egotism of the white man” (213). But it is Gary Snyder who is separated out for discussion in the second prong of the two-part attack. Snyder, whom Geary Hobson in another essay in the same collection describes as a “white shaman” (103), claims to have learned a sense of the land from Native American chants and other materials that he has studied in depth. Yet as Silko points out, Snyder poses as having a “Native” (in all senses) relationship to the land, downplaying his own ancestry as a descendant of colonist settlers. He [End Page 1] ignores Native claim on his own extensive tract of land, playing at an attitude of non-ownership while both having bought it and also continuing to pay taxes on it, thus recognizing the settler state’s claim of title ahead of the ancestral owners of the land. According to Turtle Island’s blurb, Snyder is attempting “the rediscovery of this land and the ways in which we might become natives of the place,” but Silko baldly states that as long as he continues to participate in settler state structures and continues to ignore Native title, his work remains “just another dead-end in more than two hundred years of searching for a genuine American identity” (215). Silko’s attack, and similar broadsides against Snyder’s generation of poets, have been the subject of much discussion. Some are merely dismissive: for example, Trevor Carolan resists any such criticism as the product of “[L]iteral-minded rationalist[s with] orthodox literary imagination[s]” (23) unable to cope with “the celebrated Beat rebel” (18). Other writers such as Tim Dean have sought to justify the appropriation of voice by arguing that Snyder does not seek to construct a personal identity that denies his settler roots, but rather constructs a shamanistic persona for greater ends. Silko and others might well retort that Snyder’s description of his project as shamanistic ignores the constructed notion of the concept of “the shaman,” a term that was developed by Western synthetic anthropology for the purposes of making cross-cultural comparisons easier (MacDonald 92). They might also note that Snyder has a history of rejecting his birth identity as a settler, for instance in the following lines: So surely I hunt the white man down in my heart.The crew-cutted Seattle boyThe Portland boy who worked for U.P. that was me. (“A Curse on the Men in Washington” 3) Yet such superficial responses, for Snyder’s admirers, ignore the central tenets of Snyder’s practice. Dean, and those following in his wake, argue that Snyder’s shamanistic persona is not just a literary construct but also develops from years both of study of Native American traditions and also of firsthand experience of the land that allows him to speak for and from the position of the wounded ecosystem. Snyder therefore [End Page 2] becomes, as shaman, what Dean calls an “intermediary between nonhuman nature and the human community...