"What Do You Do When You Love Everyone on Every Side of the War?": Teaching the Complexities of American Indian Literature

Abstract

Recently, I taught Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony, in a night introductory novel course to a mostly adult class at a Minnesota community college with some rather surprising results. In my onequarter course, I attempted to introduce students to a variety of American novels by using a combination of well-known and relatively unknown voices and by incorporating novels written by women and minority writers. Accordingly, we read and discussed Kate Chopin's The Awakening, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and finished with Silko's Ceremony. Throughout the course we discussed issues of who got published, when, and why; audience response; how books came to be considered literature and by whom; techniques of the novel; portrayal of and perspectives on gender, race, class, and realism. We also talked about their responses and difficulties with the readings, and by the end of the quarter, I asked them to think about which author of those we read they would pick as having made the greatest contribution to literature and why. I was surprised that about eighty percent of the forty-member class picked Hurston. From listening to their comments I have some speculations as to why this is so and why we need to assign and teach American Indian writers as important American literary voices. First, racism notwithstanding, I believe students chose Hurston because of the masterful way that she captured the all-black Eatonville commuity in which she grew up, replicating beautifully the speech patterns, storytelling, and daily interactions of the small-town members. In addition, Hurston creates one of the first strong women characters and the story is upbeat; the main character does not commit suicide or turn into someone the reader dislikes. Also, since Hurston writes mostly about the Black community, students are not confronted with their racism. Many are also familiar with small-town culture. But all this aside, I also believe that students have, even in an area such as Minnesota where Blacks are