Luci Tapahonso Research Articles

Review: Sáanii Dahataal, The Women are Singing: Poems and Stories by Luci Tapahonso

Review: <i>Sáanii Dahataal, The Women are Singing: Poems and Stories</i> by Luci Tapahonso

Writing (for) Survival: Continuity and Change in Four Contemporary Native American Women's Autobiographies

by J. Browdy de Hernandez The four autobiographical texts by Native American women that I will consider in this essayThe Ways of My Grandmothers, by Beverly Hungry Wolf (Blackfoot Blood), Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing, by Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee/Otoe), Sdanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing, by Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), and Storyteller, by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo)-are speech acts that reflexively perform their message: the ongoing survival of Native American culture, on its own terms, in the face of centuries of oppression. These Native American autobiographers accept, in the interests of survival, the hybridization of their ancient cultures with the Euramerican dominant culture. They use the dominant language-American English-but in a double-voiced way, resulting in the kind of dialogized interillumination of language systems that Bakhtin says leaves neither language unchanged (Discourse in the Novel, 364). The autobiography that results from this encounter of indigenous and Euramerican worldviews hybridizes the traditional European model of autobiography with traditional Native American understandings of history and self. The four autobiographies dicussed here challenge the hegemony of the Euramerican self-made individual, insisting that the self exists only in a complex web of relationships to other people and other life forms, all of which have a part in the construction of the autobiographical identity. They replace egocentric monologue with a polyphonic, interactive autobiographical discourse, the written equivalent of a chorus of voices from the past, present, and future that offer a very different understanding of history than the conventional Euramerican autobiography. Where the traditional Euramerican autobiography moves in an orderly progression from the beginning of the life history to the end-childhood to old age, or coming of age to maturity, for example-many contemporary Native

This Incomperable Lande. A Book of American Nature Writing by Thomas J. Lyon

270 Western American Literature The statements of the writers vary from carefully crafted mini-essays (David Lavender, Elizabeth Tallent) to personal histories to simple statements of belief (Stan Steiner: “The mountains, the land, the sun, the sky are the subject of everything I write. It’s that simple!”) Max Evans tells us, “We are the land, that’s all.” Writers commenting on such a first principle inevitably sound a little self-conscious. Jack Schaefer sounds grumpiest, Richard Bradford the most self-deprecatory. The best answers tell us more by allusion or anecdote than by explanation; not surprisingly, two of those strong voices come from Native American poets (Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso). My favorite spread in the book is Sabine Ulibarri. He has a wonderful face, and Farah’s portrait gives us his wrinkles and wisdom with clarity. His words about his land are just as strong: “There it is: a challenge, a threat, a hope, and a promise. . . .The land and the sky demand a response.” Farah’sbook, her response, is a worthwhile one that left me reassured that there always will be fine writers struggling with the challenge of Ulibarri’s land. La tierra demands it. That is “the hope and the promise.” STEPHEN TRIMBLE Salt Lake City, Utah This Incomperable Lande. A Book of American Nature Writing. Edited by Thomas J. Lyon. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. 495 pages, $29.95.) For more than a century Houghton Mifflin has been a publishing house devoted to American nature writing. The works of Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs and John Muir, for example, bore the Houghton Mifflin imprint, as have books by Wallace Stegner and Edwin Way Teale. It is most appropriate, then, for Houghton Mifflin now to publish an authoritative and scholarly yet attractive and informative overview of the genre. Thomas J. Lyon’s This Incomperable Lande gives the reader two impor­ tant ingredients. A thorough—nearly a hundred pages—and well-informed introduction traces the development of nature writing in America. Beginning in Puritan times, moving through the Enlightenment and on into the nine­ teenth century when Thoreau codified the form, then touching the breadth of contemporary variations, Lyon defines and describes exactly what this dis­ tinctly American kind of literature entails. “From the age of Bartram to the present,” he explains, “the main outlines of the genre—presentation of instruc­ tive natural history information, description of personal experience in nature, and commentary on man’srelationship with the wild world—have not changed an iota.” The second section of This Incomperable Lande demonstrates this thesis. A collection of representative essays in the field, it opens with a piece from the seventeenth century, then introduces a host ofother earlywriters—Bartram, Reviews 271 Alexander Wilson, John Godman, John Audubon, Thomas Nuttall. Excerpts by familiar authors are there, too—a month from Thoreau’s Journal, some Burroughs, and some Muir. Equally well-represented are our own contempor­ aries. To the editor’s credit, though, the selections are not those so often anthologized. Rather, they have been freshly chosen to demonstrate a vision at once scientific, personal, philosophic, and ethical. A few other ingredients of the book also command applause and respect. A well-conceived continuum charts a typology of the genre. Equally helpful is a chronology that not only dates major publications but notes symbolic things as well. Some examples include: 1807 “Cedar waxwings sell for twenty-five cents a dozen in Philadelphia meat markets.” 1834 “The last elk in the Adirondacks is killed.” 1914 “The last passenger pigeon dies in the Cincinnati Zoo.” 1984 “The National Academy of Sciences reports that approximately 53,500 synthetic chemicals are in use in the United States.” Finally, Houghton Mifflin should be praised for the handsomeness of the text itself and the quality of the attendant illustrations. The book fittingly exemplifies their commitment to the field. ANN RONALD University of Nevada Reno Coyote’s Canyon. Photographs by John Telford. Text by Terry Tempest Williams. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1989. 96 pages, $15.95.) The austere beauty of southern Utah’s canyon country and the compell­ ing mythology of the vanished Anasazi dominate eight tales crafted from Terry Tempest Williams’s immersion in Hopi...

A MELUS Interview: Luci Tapahonso

The middle one of eleven children, Tapahonso was born in Shiprock, New Mexico where her family still lives on a farm three miles from the town up on the north mesa. In speaking of her early years (in the biographical statement in her first book of poems, One More Shiprock Night, published in 1981 by Tejas Art Press) she says: know that I cannot divide myself or separate myself from that place my home, my land, and my people. And that realization is my security and my mainstay in my life away from there. After attending school at the Navajo Methodist Mission in Farmington, thirty miles from Shiprock, she graduated from Shiprock High School in 1971, served in 1974 on the Board of Directors of the Phoenix Indian Center, and took part in a training program for investigative reporting at the National Indian Youth Council. In 1976 she began studying journalism at the University of New Mexico but switched her major to English after studying with Leslie Silko, graduating in 1980. Currently a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, she is pursuing a Doctorate in Modern Literature. Married to Earl Ortiz, an artist whose drawings illustrate her first volume, she is the mother of two daughters, Lori and Misty Dawn. Her second volume of poems, Seasonal Woman, was published in 1982 by Tooth of Time Press with illustrations by the internationally known Native American Artist R. C. Gorman. In his review of that book, (published in Volume 11, Numbers 3 & 4 of The Greenfield Review), Floyce Alexander writes: Luci Tapahonso's Seasonal Woman establishes the presence of a new and potentially important voice among younger American poets. For Tapahonso, he goes on to say, as for her people, the human spirit survives through remembering a 'common history' that rooted in the heart long before the white man's invasion and desecration of the continent. Like so much of the powerful poetry now being written by young Native American writers, Tapahonso's work tells the truth.