Indian Author Research Articles

The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1759–1851) in India, Ireland, and England. By Michael H. Fisher. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. xviii, 368 pp. $27.00 (cloth).

The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1759–1851) in India, Ireland, and England. By Michael H. Fisher. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. xviii, 368 pp. $27.00 (cloth).

The Life of George Copway or Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1818-1869) — and a review of his writings

George Copway (1818-1869), the Canadian Indian author, became Canada’s first literary celebrity in the United States. From 1847 to 1851 the Ojibwa from Rice Lake, Canada West (today’s Ontario), completed four books in the United States and briefly edited his own weekly newspaper in New York City. A biographical study of this writer and lecturer reveals the life story of an unusual nineteenth-century Indian who, as a noble Christian convert, gained and subsequently lost a large American audience. Secondly, it raises the important question of the historical reliability of his published work about himself and the Ojibwa Indians.

N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background by Matthias Schubnell (review)

Book Reviews117 psychoanalysis reveals private motives. But . . . " (296). Fortunately, Rabaté resists the temptation to tie it all up in so tidy and trite a package, moving instead toward a larger view which sees the poem as a tragedy of the imagination, not without its Oedipal overtones but finally reaching beyond that, following "a thin trace in the air" to that country "which leaves the voice mute but heals all wounds" (298). In sum, then, this is a stimulating study of Pound, one which approaches the Cantos from an unusual perspective and uses that perspective to help locate the Cantos in the overall context of postmodern continental thought. While I find myself disagreeing with Rabaté on a few matters (his reading of the tale of the honest sailor, for instance), these are minor quibbles. This is a solid, well written book — of immense value to the novice and the initiate alike. CHARLES GUILFORD Boise State University MATTHIAS SCHUBNELL. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. 336 p. Matthias Schubnell's work is both a biography and critical overview of this Pulitzer Prize-winning American Indian author. In the best tradition of such works, it will be valued, among other things, for its successful incorporation of Momaday's private papers, which provide for useful comparisons between published and unpublished work, and for its thorough bibliography of both primary and secondary source materials. A biographical chapter is coupled with chapters on two important Momaday themes, language and landscape, as an extended preface to individual chapters discussing House Made ofDawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain, The Names, and Momaday's poetry. Schubnell's book seems aimed at reconciling two audiences who are inevitably divided over Momaday because of their critical interests. The first are those passionate advocates of Native American literature for whom the principal virtue of Momaday's work is that it is the work of an Indian author and bears marks of this "Indianness ." The second includes those who want to read Momaday as a writer who has transcended this Indianness to produce a body of work of "universal" appeal. Schubneil argues that neither perspective on his subject is useful because both are constrained by inadequate notions of self and culture as static, impermeable, unalterable realities. Instead, not surprisingly, his analysis of the reader-writer-culture relationship resembles what he quotes as Momaday's own: "An Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself. And it is a moral idea. . . . And that idea, in order to be realized completely, has to be expressed," particularly in words (41). Unfortunately, this crucial argument only intermittently surfaces above the book's explicit agenda of providing close readings and historical contextualization for the Momaday corpus. A book of such scope and complexity demands more attention than can be given here, so let me only sketch out the volume's strengths and weaknesses. Schubneil is at his best in articulating the commonality of interest, method, value, and poetic theory Momaday shares with a number of twentieth-century writers. My sense is that this is one of his central aims, a revisionist impulse against the faddish 118Rocky Mountain Review neoprimitivism of some who want to attribute the distinctive features of Momaday's work to his Indianness, and he has brought this off with great skill and force. Especially illuminating here are his comparative readings of Lawrence, Dinesen, and Momaday on landscape. By using Momaday's correspondence, he convincingly demonstrates the direct influence of Winters and Stevens on the younger Momaday. The elucidation of the relationship between Stevens' idealism and Momaday's "idea of himself" is effective and powerful if for no other reason than it demonstrates that all that is not Aristotelian is not Indian. Occasionally though, Schubnell's attempted demonstrations of influence, like those of others before him, get caught up in the problematics of influence-peddling and their success varies greatly. A second great strength of the book is that is supplies useful readings of neglected works in the Momaday corpus. For instance, the book's longest chapter, which is on Momaday's poetry, is a storehouse of not only sound but insightful readings. I learned...

The Protagonist as a Mixed-Blood in John Joseph Mathews' Novel: "Sundown"

John Joseph Mathews' novel, Sundown, recreates as its setting Osage history from the period prior to the allotment of Osage Indian land in 1906 through the oil boom of the 1920s. It also traces the search for cultural identity of Challenge Windzer, a young mixed-blood from a wealthy Osage family. Sundown, initially published in 1934, is one of the earliest novels by an Indian author to present the theme of the assimilated or mixed-blood Indian as an alienated character.1

The Elements of San Joaquin by Gary Soto

Reviews 73 The Elements of San Joaquin. By Gary Soto. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. $2.95.) The biggest failure of many ethnic and minority-group writers is that their political viewpoints often turn them into moralizing zealots or right­ eous cultural revolutionaries. These authors tend to depict the plight of their particular groups with a fervor whose focus is essentially one-dimen­ sional. Metaphor gives way to harangue, nimbleness of thought succumbs to the straightjacket of political and racial argot. Chicano poet Gary Soto, a former fieldhand in the San Joaquin Valley, manages to avoid such short­ comings in The Elements of San Joaquin and thereby establishes that he is considerably more than just a good ethnic writer; he is a good poet. The book has already been awarded the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum, and six of the poems were reprinted in New York Times Book Review, some indications that Soto’s audience extends sig­ nificantly beyond members of his race. And while it’s true that his thirtyeight poems concern the hardships and difficulties of migrant workers, he also records their satisfactions and joys, albeit small ones. Indeed life in migrant camps does not include many of the typical middle-class amenities, but it does contain many touching moments of familial devotion. And Soto takes care to note that economic and social deprivation do not necessarily spawn moral degeneration. As he points out there are murderers, rapists, and thieves to be sure among the Chicano poor, but more importantly there are those who are able to turn their labors ino causes for celebra­ tion. Hoeing cotton or picking grapes can be a respectful act, one capable of canceling the effacing nihilism of social violence. Acts of personal gen­ erosity and kindness are as historically important to these workers as the decades of cultural and governmental neglect. An attitude of abidance, Soto knows, helps salve years of political and economic anonymity. Soto’s topics extend beyond the fields and farms into all aspects of migrant life in the valley — the charity hospitals, the barbershops, the streets and alleys — and he depicts them all in a lean, simple style. And although Soto is capable of mimicking the mannerisms of uneducated Chicanos in a straightforward, uncomplicated style, his verses are not unintellectual. His simplicity is merely a stylistic device, one appropriately suited to his seem­ ingly primitive and occasionally bucolic subjects. Consequently his meta­ phors are drawn from poverty, work, and failure, but they are nonetheless evocative, enlightening, and haunting. In describing the depression that occurs with unemployment from the autumn rains, Soto closes “Rain” with the apt observation: The skin of my belly will tighten like a belt And there will be no reason for pockets. 74 Western American Literature Consider the assailant he details in “The Underground Parking” : A man who holds fear Like the lung a spot of cancer, Waits for your wife. These images are at once likely and terrifying. But Soto’s characters, much like his metaphors, are transcendent. Imaginatively they rise above the meanness of their appearance, not as unscarred ideologues or saints or rhetoricians, but as human — frail and impoverished — whose heritage is simply and redemptively the earth. JERRY BRADLEY, New Mexico Tech American Indian Fiction. By Charles R. Larson. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. 208 pages, $9.50.) Larson’s study discusses sixteen novels by fourteen authors. It does not deal with the short story (I believe no collection of stories by a single Indian author has yet been published), and limits itself rigorously to those novels written by Indian authors; thus, such novels as Laughing Boy, The Man Who Killed the Deer, and Little Big Man lie outside its scope, despite a long chapter — the second — about changing views of Pocahontas which would seem to have been better saved for another book (none of these six­ teen novels mentions Pocahontas). Within these limitations, Larson’s book is an excellent introduction to American Indian fiction. Larson sees four stages in the history of Indian fiction. The first, which he calls assimilationist, includes Chief Simon Pokagon’s Queen of the Woods (1899), John M. Oskison’s Wild...