Native Fiction Research Articles

Tommy Orange Has Company

The recognizable formal structure of tommy orange's there there and its familiar revelations about indigenous american life, as much as the components distinguishing the novel from other Native-authored works that share its concerns, have propelled it to the center of conversations about contemporary Native literature. Yet the excitement about the arrival of a new, talented writer has obscured There There's roots in American Indian literary history, especially its affiliations with novels by other Native authors. As the numerous images of characters in mirrors and other reflective surfaces suggest, Orange establishes Indigenous people looking at Indigenous people, and Indigenous authors looking at Indigenous authors, as foundational to the novel's form. There There reflects the work of many other Native fiction writers, most prominently Sherman Alexie, but also James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, and David Treuer, among others. He evokes the formal features of many of Louise Erdrich's novels, too, but unlike Erdrich, Orange leaves readers with the overwhelming impression of irrevocably damaged Indigenous communities with dismal prospects for breaking cycles of violence and trauma.

New Trends in Native American Studies: The Road Back to Sweetgrass and the Palimpsest Approach to Native Fiction

This article reflects on recent developments in the broad category of Native American Studies, as it offers a particular proposal of analysis for contemporary Native literature which is based on the palimpsest metaphor. The text first revises the dialogue of Native Studies with the Turn to Ethics, emphasizing the primary ceremonial—or transformative—motivation of Native writing, and with Trauma Studies, offering a re-mapping of the paradigm by theorizing Native American grief and its political implications when expressed in literature. It then covers several recently articulated developments of Native storytelling: the dialogues between storytelling and theories; the concept of tribalography; and the recent turn to theory in Native studies. Arguing that the future of Native American Studies will necessarily have to reach for some level of balance between difference and relation, it reflects on contemporary Native identity, best illustrated by Gerald Vizenor’s concepts of the postindian and transmotion. The author then connects all these developments to the palimpsest metaphor, arguing that its emphasis on difference and relation, which come from the simultaneous view of the palimpsestic and the palimpestuous ways of understanding the metaphor, offers a useful way to interpret contemporary Native American literatures and identity, for it conveniently addresses the double reference to survival and the threat of disintegration that Native writing is largely based on. The article then analyses Linda LeGarde Grover’s The Road Back to Sweetgrass (2014) from the palimpsestic/palimpestuous perspective, examining the textual efforts to rescue hidden or written-upon meanings, and asserting the way in which those recovered voices are brought to the surface and are simultaneously acknowledged as part of a larger whole, as engaging in dialogic relation to a series of other voices with which they coexist in tension and contradiction. The double motivation of this reading—that of recovering, digging, denouncing, and of vindicating belonging, equality, and our common humanity—is key to the understanding of Native literature as a form of activism.

Sexual Orphanings

This essay examines the production of Native queer childhood in nineteenth- and twentieth-century boarding schools. I argue that the schools produced “sexual orphanings” in Native children, which was achieved through education and abuse that queered Native children's conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, and kinship and produced shame. Sexual orphanings queered children away from their bodies and sexualities, which also worked to orient them away from the future. I turn to Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) to consider what erotics might remain for these children and to look at how genocidal sexual orphanings might be recalibrated in Native fiction toward survivance rather than disappearance.

The Rise of First Nations’ Fiction Films: Shelley Niro, Jeff Barnaby, and Yves Sioui Durand

Since the 1960s, when First Nations crews began training at the National Film Board, indigenous filmmaking — mostly in the form of documentaries — has generally taken place on the margins of mainstream production in Québec. While the commitment to addressing native issues and portraying native lives of NFB documentarists like Alanis Obomsawin has been of immeasurable social and aesthetic value, recent productions have shown a veritable thirst among native peoples to tell their stories and cultural heritage through a fictional frame. This essay profiles three First Nations directors whose recent productions have included fictional film. Mohawk artist and filmmaker Shelley Niro has made several films that deal with Native women who are trying to find their way in a modern world without losing sight of who they are. Kissed by Lightening is her first, award-winning, full-length feature and offers a synthesis of several themes present in her previous work. Jeff Barnaby, a Mi'gmaq filmmaker, has made three short subjects that all deal with identity questions, but from a male perspective, and is currently editing his first feature, Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Finally, Yves Sioui Durand, whose 2012 feature, Mesnak, is billed as the first Native feature film made in Québec, offers yet another example of how a creative artist, this time from the Huron-Wendat community of Wendake, gives voice to the identity crisis experienced by so many of his people who have lost touch with their culture, community or family in the vortex of modern urban life. While focusing on such key questions as identity and language, this essay also examines how native fiction film differs or borrows from the “Hollywood medium” that has exploited the “reel Injun,” to quote the title of Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond's documentary on the subject, for over a hundred years.

REDAKTORIAUS VAIDMUO VERSTINĖS GROŽINĖS LITERATŪROS LEIDYBOJE

The goal of the article is to determine the role of editor in the publishing of translated fiction. The case study of editor’s role in the publishing of translated fiction is relevant in particular due to the popularity of translated fiction in Lithuania. As shown by the statistical analysis of Li­thuanian press (years 2000–2011), translated fiction print runs are almost two times higher than native fiction print runs.The problematics of translated fiction editor’s role is related to the editor’s interim position in the literary publishing process. The editor is between the author and the translator, and this determines the uncertainty of the editor’s role. In this context, the problematics of editor’s role is closely related to such aspects of translated fiction as translator’s and editor’s cooperation, literary quality of the translation, the publishing policy of the publishing house related to the literary quality of translated fiction. Various methods were used while writing this article. The interview method was used to perform the qualitative study. While using the document and source analysis method it was concluded that the editor is like the connective tissue between the author and the reader in the publishing process. The questionnaire and the comparison methods helped to uncover that editor’s role in the publishing of translated fiction is the dimension of text quality. It also revealed that the quality of the translated fiction literature highly depends on the com­munication between the editor and the translator.

The Critique of Violent Atonement in Sherman Alexie's <em>Indian Killer</em> and David Treuer's <em>The Hiawatha</em>

The Critique of Violent Atonement in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and David Treuer's The Hiawatha Lydia R. Cooper (bio) John Smith, the disturbed, violent Native American protagonist of Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer (1996), decides that his pain and the suffering of all Indigenous people will end only when "one white man … [dies] for all the lies that had been told to Indians" (132). John's belief that his and his people's salvation will be attained in the death of a white victim becomes the disquieting issue at the heart of Indian Killer, a question that is answered but not resolved when John decides to kill himself instead of his chosen white victim, imagining his suicide as a reenactment of the Spokane Jesuit priest Duncan's Christ-like trek into the desert, bearing in his soul the suffering of his people (412). Because of the horrifying violence at the end of the novel, Indian Killer remains Alexie's most controversial book to date, disturbing to critics, reviewers, and the author himself. In one interview, Alexie claims that the novel "still, to this day, troubles me the most" of all his books (Campbell par. 15). Indian Killer is undeniably challenging with its relentless anger and despair. John Skow's often-cited description of the book, for example, calls it "septic with … [an] unappeasable fury" (88). The "septic" violence of Indian Killer, rooted in the protagonist's self-inflicted martyrdom, reflects the same problematic sacrificial action at the heart of David Treuer's The Hiawatha (1999). In Treuer's novel, the main character, Simon, claims responsibility for murder on behalf of his nephew in order to atone for accidentally killing his brother. His expiatory act solidifies his mother's belief that he is like Cain, the prototypical Judeo-Christian scapegoat condemned to wander in [End Page 32] penance for fratricide (Treuer 23). Indian Killer and The Hiawatha thus describe acts of suffering that are manifestations of the symbolism and rhetoric of religious violence. What makes the respective death and exile in these novels so disconcerting, however, is that the acts are committed by men intent on fulfilling archetypal savior roles who nevertheless fail to save themselves or anyone else. Their failures suggest that the novels assert the critical importance of subjugating religious symbolism to practical and ethical critique. In general, examinations of religious symbolism in Native American fiction tend to focus either on celebrations of tribal ceremonies, rituals, and beliefs as authenticating or liberating images or on criticisms of imperialist, missional aspects of American Christianity. However, in order to understand the critique of violent atonement in Alexie's Indian Killer and Treuer's The Hiawatha, it is necessary to place these novels within the context of theological and literary studies that move beyond the binary breakdown of tribal versus Christian ideology. In his article "Native and Christian: Religion and Spirituality as Transcultural Negotiation in American Indian Novels of the 1990s," Karsten Fitz draws attention to a reluctance among literary scholars to explore "the issue of whether or not it is possible to negotiate a middle ground" between "traditional tribal and Christian religions" in Native American fiction (1).1 This reluctance to navigate the admittedly tricky terrain of religion in Native fiction, particularly the contentious area between religious assimilation, syncretism, and adherence to tribal traditions, creates a gap in literary scholarship. In fact, Fitz suggests that religious contact zones in Native fiction "operat[e] as a relational cultural model" by promoting exchange over and against exclusion, a relational model that often plays out in religious forms and symbolism that are varied and generative (13). Therefore, studies of how religion and religious symbolism play out in contemporary fiction by Native authors may yield surprising and important insights into the capacity of narrative to negotiate meaningful syntheses of competing religious ideas, practices, and beliefs. Furthermore, such a study may illuminate practical methods for incorporating what Fitz calls "transcultural," or culturally hybrid, identities. [End Page 33] Fitz's claim is part of a growing critical interest in how Native American writing describes meaningful ways of negotiating contrasting and often competing cultural contact zones through the lens of religious syncretism. James Treat, in his...

Writing the Cross Culture: Native Fiction on the White Man's Religion (review)

Reviewed by: Writing the Cross Culture: Native Fiction on the White Man’s Religion Cynthia Carsten (bio) Writing the Cross Culture: Native Fiction on the White Man’s Religion Edited by James TreatFulcrum Publishing, 2006 This collection of short fiction by Native American authors opens with a short piece by Vine Deloria Jr., which is a humorous turning of the tables on academic scholars of American Indian cultures. Carter Revard follows in the same vein with his "Report to the Nation: Claiming Europe," which posits a history in which Native North Americans are the colonizers of Europe, a scenario I always find nearly impossible to entertain given my understanding of American Indians' advanced state of ethical development at the time of contact. Both stories, however, underscore the absurdities of the European literary tropes of savagism and civilization. From this point, the volume is loosely ordered chronologically, beginning with works published in the early twentieth century. Zitkala-Sa's "The Soft-Hearted Sioux," and E. Pauline Johnson's "As It Was in the Beginning" were both originally published in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Among the earliest Native Americans to write fiction for a Euro-American readership, both authors are highly critical of the bigotries and racism of early Christian missionaries who sought to convert American Indians on the one hand, yet rejected them as fully equal human beings on the other. Given the literary expectations of publishers and readers of the time, it is not surprising [End Page 125] that both stories are nuanced versions of the savage versus civilization theme, but I am not sure that the general reader uneducated in Euro-American literary history would grasp fully the ethnocentrism associated with the stereotype of the American Indian as noble savage. I think introductory comments to the stories providing some socio-historical background would have been helpful, not only for general readers but also for instructors who may want to adopt the text for courses in Native American studies. Likewise, the reader unfamiliar with the history of colonialism, missionization, and the religious and cultural genocide aimed at Native Americans may fail to comprehend the role of Christianity in the social disruption of Indian lives, both historically and in the contemporary situation. Many of the more recently published stories assume the reader's familiarity with the underlying causes of addiction, domestic abuse, and religious polarization that exist among Native peoples today, but it has been my experience in teaching Native American literatures that many students require extensive background knowledge to avoid ethnocentric readings of the texts. I found my own aesthetic appreciation of many of the stories to depend on prior knowledge of such issues. If the book has crossover potential, as the editor claims in his afterword, then perhaps at least a brief critical introduction to the book would have been of benefit in this regard. The editor's fictionalized afterword, oddly reminiscent of Washington Irving's History of New York (1809), a satire on American religious colonialism in which the Earth is conquered by alien invaders, did little to dispel assumptions of Native Americans as tragic and conquered subjects. James Treat's version, entitled "Inscribing the Wound World: Human Fiction on the Spaceman's Religion," calls the aliens' imposed religion Flagellantism, a name that surely calls into question Native Americans' artful strategies of response to the presence of Christianity in their lives. Although the editor warns that "the attentive reader will recognize that this literary device involves more than a simple substitution of terminology," perhaps the analogy is just too imaginatively "alien" to generate real empathy. Despite these drawbacks, the text offers much in the way of playful resistance and the subtleties of Native humor. Among my favorites: Basil Johnston's "Secular Revenge," in which Kitug-Aunquot puts one over on the priest who forbids him to eat bologna on Fridays by delivering sawdust to church in place of wood, telling the outraged priest, "Fauder, you say bologney, meat. Okay; den sawdus' is woods"; and Fus Fixico's old-timers ("Letter to the Editor") who play hooky from church because "the best place to be sorry for grafting and to get close to the Great...

Thomas E. Moore's Sour Sofkee in the Tradition of Muskogee Dialect Writers

A discussion in the field of Native literary studies concerns the de gree to which contemporary Native fiction is politically oriented, especially in relation to Native writings of the nineteenth century, which were largely nonfiction and more obviously related to par ticular claims either in the writing itself or the author's involvement with activism (Samson Occom's critique of racism in the missionary field, William Apess's collective work with the Mashpees to control lumber resources and elect their own select men, George Copway's ill-conceived pleas for relocating Ojibways to the Dakotas, and Sara Winnemucca's arguments to allow her people to return to the Malheur Reservation, e.g.). When not directly confronting a par ticular land or jurisdiction issue these writers often addressed the broader human rights of their people as well as the problematic ways Americans imagined them. The prevalence of nonfiction in the nineteenth century, the dearth of creative works of the imagination, and the idea of a fiction that would arise in a later generation with questionable political cre dentials is complicated by those who see a hidden politics between the lines in the more recent fictional work, others a more direct en gagement, and the occasional critic who discerns a complete avoid ance of politics altogether. The dialect letters that began appearing in Indian Territory newspapers in the late 1880s challenge virtually all these assumptions. The letters are notable as both works of fiction as well as a forum for particular political issues. In the best-known instance, that is, Alexander Posey's Fus Fixico letters, fiction writing

Touring Indian Country: A Review of Native Fiction from 1999 and 2000

Touring Indian Country: A Review of Native Fiction from 1999 and 2000

All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction

All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction

Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature ed. by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski

Reviews 263 All My Relations: An Anthology ofContemporary Canadian NativeFiction. Edited by Thomas King. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 236 pages, $14.95.) Thomas King’s anthology provides a welcome collection of Canadian Na­ tive fiction to those already familiar with the large and diverse body of Native American literatures. Doubtless itwill serve as a classroom companion to Craig Lesley’s TalkingLeaves: ContemporaryNativeAmerican Short Stones, An Anthology. King begins the collection with the transcription of an oral story told by Harry Robinson, thus signaling his attempt to push the traditionally-held boundaries of “fiction.”Also included are an excerpt from a Tomson Highway drama, Coyote stories by Peter Blue Cloud and King himself, and a selection from BasilJohnston’slife history/autobiography Indian SchoolDays. Inclusion of such selections goes a long way in challenging the boundaries offiction estab­ lished by the dominant culture, boundaries that have, in the past, successfully marginalized the art of oral and transitionally literate cultures. The stories which have obvious roots in oral tradition reflect a rich body of cultural myth, but other, more consciously literary, stories also skillfully inte­ grate the mythic.Jeanette C.Armstrong’s“This IsaStory”uses a narrative frame to present her prophetic storyabout the return ofKyoti.Joan Crate’s “Welcome to the Real World” intercalates a contemporary story with the mythic story of Thunder, creating a paratacticjuxtaposition that empowers her tale. Significant additions to the anthology are several stories not bound to, as King suggests, “the expectations conjured up by the notion of ‘Indianness.’” Beth Brant, Jordan Wheeler, and Richard Green offer stories that, while they have Indian characters, are not concerned with what separates the characters from the larger, white culture, but with what connects them to the larger, human culture. With his generous sampling of mature and maturing writers, with his willingness to enlarge the idea of “fiction,” and with his inclusion of Indian writers who risk writing about subjects and characters not solely “Indian,” Thomas King givesus avaluable collection ofsome ofthe best Canadian Native fiction. KATHYWHITSON University ofMissouri-Columbia Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at theFrontier in American Literature. Edited by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, andJoanne B. Karpinski. (Madison, NewJersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. 206 pages, $33.50.) Make no mistake, the “frontier”in this book has little to do with Frederick Jackson Turner’s or, for that matter, the American West’s. For the most part, the thirteen essayists concern themselves with interior frontiers having scant 264 Western American Literature relevance to either demographyor landscape. Like Geiger counters quickening to nuclear emanations, these critics pulsate when encountering even the word frontier, which triggers their free-wheeling use of it as metaphor. The trio of editors say the book “explores frontiers in social, racial, and gender politics as well as, even more fundamentally, frontiers ofart and language.”They paytheir respects to Turner, Fiedler, Lawrence, and Slotkin but more au courant throughout are Backelard, Bakhtin, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Todorov, and Voloshin. Indeed, a generation of critics goes and a generation comes. Characterizing the “gothic”frontier is the irreconcilable disparity between the two worlds separated by it: one world ordered, pragmatic, conventional, rigid; and the other, hidden world teeming with “weedy chaos,” “misty shad­ ows,” “riotous emotion.” The icon described here is Grant Wood’s famous painting entitled “American Gothic,” which serves as the book’s governing paradigm. Accordingly, the frontier beckons internal quests beyond geography, beyond social features and distinctions, into realms where culture gives way to the unknown and primordial; to evil, terror, desolation, despair; to the “trans­ formation of consciousness.”However, the collection’s best essays retain link­ age to the exterior reality ofplace. Davis Gross on O. E. Rolvaag (“No Place to Hide”); Scott P. Sanders on the poet Richard Shelton and novelist Leslie Silko (“Southwest Gothic”); and Mark Busby on Sam Shepard (“Frontier Gothic”) affirm such localitywhile opening gothic mysteries that are not merely bizarre or grisly (conventions of an earlier gothicism) but that juxtapose our own colliding fears and ideals. As a gloss toJames Fenimore Cooper, EdwardAbbey, and others, the lateJames K. Folsom, towhom the book isdedicated, quotes the redoubtable Walt Kelly’s Pogo—“we have met the enemy and...

All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction ed. by Thomas King

All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction ed. by Thomas King

Canadian Fiction Magazine: An Anthology of Canadian Native Fiction

Canadian Fiction Magazine: An Anthology of Canadian Native Fiction