Structures of Urban Poverty in Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue

Abstract

Greg Sarris’s 1994 Grand Avenue offers tough urban stories about a longfought, still-continuing struggle for survival and self-determination.1 Following the Native population shift from reservations to cities, Sarris (Coast Miwok/ Pomo), like many Native writers, has engaged urban Indian experiences.2 In surveying this fiction, Carol Miller (Cherokee) explains that it provides “a significant illustrative resource about the pragmatic business of ‘going along’ in the world, just as the old stories always have done.”3 Sarris’s stories fulfill this role by presenting the day-to-day lives of a contemporary, fictional Pomo community living in a multiracial neighborhood not far from their traditional homeland. Although displaced, they are still intact on “an in-town reservation: blacks, Mexicans, Indians” (198). The stories depict poverty, high unemployment, destructive sexuality, and parenting that provides little protection for children.4 Conditions on Grand Avenue are the culmination of two centuries of exploitation. Recognizing this, Sarris has created a collection of complexly interrelated stories that are neither victim-blaming indictments nor voyeuristic accounts of dysfunctional families. He states, “My books are chronicles of survival, how a people survive for better and for worse. They light the dark places so we can all—all of us, Indian and non-Indian—see where we have been, where we are, and where we might go.”5 To understand better the devastating conditions and the possibilities for hope that these stories depict, we need to consider how historically developed socioeconomic structures shape the characters’ present choices. Forced onto the margins of economic production, Pomo individuals and communities face the profound cultural consequences of their position in US society. Without a historical perspective, readers can easily see the characters in Grand Avenue as hopelessly trapped in a world of their own making. Thus, this article