Title: Nature in Native American Literatures
Author(s): Hertha D. Wong
Source: American Nature Writers. Ed. John Elder. Vol. 2. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996. From Scribner Writers
Series.
Document Type: Topic overview, Critical essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 Charles Scribner's Sons,
COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
IN 1969, for the first time, the Pulitzer Prize for literature was
awarded to an American Indian writer. N. Scott Momaday 's
receipt of the prestigious award for his novel House Made of
Dawn (1968) initiated what some scholars have called a Native
American Renaissance, a period of renewed interest in and
publication of American Indian writers. Whereas Vine Deloria, Jr.,
has noted that fascination with American Indians seems to ebb and
flow in twenty-year cycles, interest in literature by Native
American writers has been growing consistently since the 1960s.
The importance of place, the narrative dimensions of history, the
potency of storytelling, the possibility of (re)connection to cultural
traditions, the struggle to define Indian identity, the translation of
oral literatures into print, the interconnectedness of all forms of
life, the sacredness of the earth, and the insistence on the power of
language to articulate and influence are all central aspects of
contemporary Native American literatures. Because indigenous
people have long been written about (particularly by
anthropologists) but less often have written for themselves,
because educators are increasingly committed to a broadly
multicultural curriculum that reflects the diversity of the United
States, and because some of those concerned with the challenges of
the postmodern age (such as environmental destruction and
spiritual skepticism) seek alternative models to those originating in
Western Europe, it seems likely that Native American literatures
will continue to grow in appeal.
The association between nature and Native American cultures is
well known. A wide array of Indians and non-Indians · from
environmentalists to spiritualists, from academics to history buffs ·
routinely invoke a vaguely defined "love of Mother Earth" and a
kinship with all living things as defining features of Native
American modes of thought. Even though there is great diversity
of culture, language, and geography throughout the hundreds of
nations in Native North America, a sense of intimate connection to
the land is central to most, and such a geocentric perspective is
reflected in Native American literatures. What follows is an
attempt to sketch in very broad strokes the inclusive conception of
nature shared by many indigenous peoples. More particularly, the
focus here is on how place · precise geographic locations and the
network of relations enacted within them · is important in
American Indian literatures.
Definitions and Terminology
Before considering how the natural world is represented in Native
American literatures, it is important to clarify a few terms and
ideas used throughout this essay. The term "Native American," for
instance, is used interchangeably with "American Indian." Both are
used to denote indigenous people, that is, descendants of those
culture groups who have lived longest in a particular region. Since
many Native Americans refer to themselves simply as "Indians"
subverting the European misnomer to make it their own, "Indian"
is used occasionally as well. Also, in this discussion, "Native
American," "American Indian," or "Indian" refers to persons
indigenous to what is now the United States rather than to the
Americas generally. Although "indigenous" is associated with an
intimate connection to a specific geography, the term applies also
to nomadic peoples and to those who have been dispossessed of or
removed from their homelands, because people can be linked to a
particular place (via tradition, history, memory, or story, for
instance) even when physically separated from it.
Native American Perceptions of Nature
The distinction between Western and non-Western notions of
nature has often been noted. Although any generalization has
limitations and an element of misrepresentation, it is true to say
that, in general, European Americans consider themselves separate
from, and often superior to, nature, whereas indigenous people see
themselves as part of the interconnective web of the natural world.
As a consequence of such culture-specific assumptions, European
Americans have seen naure as a potent force to be subdued and as
a valuable resource to be used, whereas Native Americans have
viewed nature as a powerful force to be respected and as a
nurturing Mother to be honored. In contrast to the hierarchical
Judeo-Christian tradition, Native American traditions emphasize
egalitarianism. Native people, says Laguna Pueblo writer and
English professor Paula Gunn Allen , "acknowledge the essential
harmony of all things and see all things as being of equal value in
the scheme of things" (Studies, p. 5). "Even a rock has spirit or
being," explains Leslie Marmon Silko , "although we may not
understand it" ("Landscape," p. 84). Nature, then, which includes
all celestial bodies, animals, plants, rocks, and minerals, is not
separate from humans.
Native American cultures and the narratives they generate both
arise from and refer to specific geographic sites. Just as European
Americans often define themselves in relation to a specific social
geography, so Native Americans often define themselves in
relation to a precise physical geography that is mapped in a
network of social relations (such as kinship and clan relations). A
set of binary oppositions (itself a western mode of thought)
oversimplifies the issue and might better be replaced by a spectrum
of positions that reflect the diversity of perspectives within both
groups. Nevertheless, the contrast between European American
and Native American perceptions of nature accurately describes
some of the basic assumptions that illuminate the dominant
behavior of these two sets of cultures.
Indians and Environmentalism
Although pre-Columbian indigenous people in the Americas lived
intimately and respectfully with the plant and animal life of their
environments (what we call today an ecological awareness), pre-
twentieth-century indigenous people would not have considered
themselves "environmentalists." First, the term suggests a
separation between humans and the rest of the natural world that
many Native people would not have acknowledged. Second, the
term is specific to a particular historical period and is used most
accurately to reflect a twentieth-century philosophical and political
awareness of the interrelatedness of all aspects of nature and the
simultaneous fear of global destruction. Historians caution against
interpreting the past from the point of view of the present (a
practice not entirely avoidable; historians, of necessity, interpret
and construct the past from the present moment) because such a
strategy ignores the political, economic, and social conditions of a
previous period. What we interpret today as indigenous
environmentalism did not arise from fear of the human destruction
of the natural world but rather from a pragmatic understanding of
the reciprocity between humans and all living beings (including,
for example, kinship with celestial bodies, land, animals, and
plants). And such reciprocity was due, at least in part, to how
human survival depended on precise knowledge of the properties
of plants, the habits of animals, and the configurations of the
geography within which they all existed.
Environmentalists have often looked to Native American cultures
for models of living in harmony with nature. Sometimes nonIndians have used Indians as images of a people living in an
Edenic, pretechnological era; sometimes they have even revised
the words of Native speakers to suit their own political agendas.
The history of the so-called environmental speech of Chief Seattle
(Seeathl), researched by Rudolf Kaiser, is a good example of how
Indians have sometimes been reinvented and (re)presented to suit
the interests of the dominant society. In this case, Seattle has been
presented as a natural ecologist. The ecological speech so popular
in the United States and Europe is, in fact, primarily the work of
several non-Indians. The fourth version of Seattle's speech,
displayed at the 1974 world's fair in Spokane, Washington, is a
poetic adaptation of the third. The third version was rewritten
substantially in 1970-1971 by scriptwriter Ted Perry. Perry's
version, in turn, was inspired by the second version · William
Arrowsmith's revision in 1969 of the "original" record of the 1854
speech. But the "original" speech is really a written record of what
Dr. Henry A. Smith remembered of Chief Seattle's address several
days after having heard it. In short, Perry rewrote Arrowsmith's
revision of Smith's remembered reconstruction of Chief Seattle's
words. Such an editorial history makes it difficult to know with
any certainty precisely what Chief Seattle said. It seems clear,
however, that Chief Seattle was reconstructed as an environmental
spokesperson in the 1970s.
Similarly, some writers, artists, environmentalists, spiritual
seekers, and consumers of popular culture have invented the
"Indian" in the preferred images of the dominant society, often
transforming complex and diverse Native people into a monolithic
cultural commodity whose signs (feathers, beads, and ecological
orations, for instance) can be exchanged in a market economy.
Many non-Natives seek inspiration and vision from indigenous
cultures; as a result there have been discussions of if, when, and
how such cultural borrowings are appropriate. Given the
devastating effects of colonialism on indigenous people, some
Native people fear that, not satisfied with Native land, non-Indians
now want Native knowledge. Non-Indians' gleaning what they
want (and often only superficially understand) from Indian
knowledge and culture, they conclude, amounts to cultural theft, an
act that participates in cultural genocide. Others, believing that a
paradigm shift is necessary for global survival, choose to share
their beliefs, traditions, and narratives with anyone genuinely
interested. Momaday, for instance, suggests that the Kiowa "regard
of and for the natural world" could be used as a model by all
Americans who are afflicted with a "kind of psychic dislocation"
("Man," pp. 162, 166). That this is not a simple matter is reflected
in the ever-growing legal battles that are part of an attempt to
define intellectual (and cultural) property and the ongoing debates
to clarify the ethics of representation.
Some Native Americans scholars and writers have written in
response to western nature writers and historians, critiquing,
correcting, and refining terminology and, in the process, expanding
culture-bound perspectives. Alfonso Ortiz, an anthropology
professor and San Juan Tewa Indian, has critiqued the term
"frontier," for instance, because "one culture's frontier may be
another culture's backwater or backyard" ("Indian/White
Relations," p. 3). Similarly, "wilderness," a term dear to
seventeenth-century colonists, nineteenth-century historians, and
twentieth-century environmentalists and one associated historically
with Indians, reflects a colonist's point of view. In the early days,
wilderness and Indians were both depicted by Europeans as "wild."
But "Only to the white man was nature a wilderness," says Luther
Standing Bear in Land of the Spotted Eagle (1993; 1978 ed., p. 26).
The wilderness may have been unknown and frightening for
newcomers, but it was home to those who lived there. Now, more
often than not in popular culture, wilderness and Indians represent
a physical and spiritual retreat, respectively, into a pristine past in
which humans and nature lived harmoniously and where a promise
for the future may be found. Native American critiques of
European American environmentalist terminology should not
suggest that Native people are unconcerned about environmental
issues, but rather that they are acutely aware that both the
destruction and the protection of the earth, air, and water have been
dominated by European-American self-interest. Ironically,
although they have been made the symbols of environmentalism
by some non-Natives, Native Americans often find themselves at
odds with environmentalists, particularly when indigenous rights to
hunt or fish may be at stake.
Although "frontier" and "wilderness" take on entirely new
meanings (and histories) when considered from the "other" side of
the frontier or from a home situated within the "wilderness," less
obviously colonizing terminology is being challenged as well.
Silko has suggested a reconsideration of the word "landscape," for
instance, because "scape" insists on a perceiver who is separate
from, outside the world being viewed. Landscape, then, with its
linguistic split between human observer/nature observed cannot
convey a "human consciousness [that] remains within the hills,
canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds and sky" ("Landscape," p.
84). Similarly, in Place and Vision, literary scholar Robert M.
Nelson criticizes the term "sense of place" because it "privileges
the process of human identification" and, in so doing, diminishes
the importance of nature as it is. These terms imply that the natural
world has value "only as it enhances and serves our human lives"
(p. 8) rather than affirming, as Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan
thinks they should, that all parts of the natural world are
"invaluable not just to us, but in themselves" ("What," p. 16). Such
interrogations of the very categories and perspectives imposed by
language make it clear that language is not a neutral medium for,
but rather a partisan constructer of, the world · and, more
significantly, that the recovery and maintenance of Native
languages are important contributions to reenvisioning human
relationships with the rest of the natural world.
In fact, the written versions of Native American oral literatures
recorded by non-Indians are the result of multiple translations:
from speech to print, often from a Native language to English,
from performance to page, and from one cultural community to
another. The resulting ethnographic document is always a
translation, a version of a single (or several) performance(s) from a
specific historical moment in a precise place shaped by a singular
audience and reconfigured by a (usually) European American
amanuensiseditor. Rather than being viewed as static, "authentic"
sources, written translations of myths, songs, and stories are better
considered recorded versions of continuing but everadaptive
practices of oral narration.
Brief Overview of Native American Literatures
Three basic categories of Native American literatures have been
outlined: (1) oral literatures, including myth, ritual dramas (such as
ceremonies, songs, and rituals), narratives (myths, tales, and
histories, for instance), and oratory; (2) life histories that were
often recorded and translated by a non-Native amanuensis-editor;
and (3) written literatures that (leaving aside picture writing) began
in the eighteenth century. These three categories suggest the
historical span and the formal diversity of Native American
literatures.
Oral literatures, with roots in pre-Columbian times, continue to be
told and performed today. Like life histories, many were recorded,
translated, and edited by European (American) historians,
ethnographers, government and military officials, clergy,
journalists, and others. Although accounts of indigenous life have
been produced since first contact, intensive and systematic
recording of oral literatures and personal narratives began in the
late nineteenth century and continues, to some degree, in the late
twentieth. Many oral narratives, performed and interpreted in their
own cultural and historical contexts, were meant to be heard and
seen collectively rather than read individually. The written texts,
then, are translations or "retranslations" of oral performances.
Some scholars believe that in such collaborative texts any Native
American voice is erased or suppressed; only the voice of the
editor, usually a member of a colonial power, remains. Others
insist that these cross-cultural texts constitute a third space that
both distinguishes and connects cultural and literary boundaries,
allowing readers to apprehend both the voice of a Native American
speaker and the pen of a European American editor. Literary
scholars have theorized about such collaborations as the "textual
equivalent[s] of the frontier" (Arnold Krupat), "literary boundary
cultures" (Hertha Wong), or "contact zones" (Mary Louise Pratt) ·
all ways to talk about a bicultural site of literary and cultural
interaction.
Today both written literatures (such as poetry, fiction, nonfiction,
and drama) and oral literatures (such as stories, songs, and spoken
life histories) are thriving. Although most Native American
writers-performers write or speak in English, others, like Rex Lee,
write in Native languages or, like Luci Tapahonso and Ray A.
Young Bear, compose bilingual texts. Oral literatures continue to
be performed in many Native communities, both reservation and
urban.
Nature in Oral Literatures
Of the many forms of oral literature, origin myths reveal most
clearly a people's orientation to the land. Among Native North
American origin myths, three basic types, each delineating a
specific relationship with the natural world, have been outlined.
Earth Diver myths, Emergence myths, and Earth Created myths.
Many times, these creation myths are followed by migration
narratives in which the people locate and/or create their physical
and cultural home. In all three myth types, a portion of creation
often exists prior to the creation of humans; then humans and
animals cocreate or shape the rest of the world. The active
engagement in a series of creative acts and the collaborative efforts
of human-people and animal-people foster a sense of responsibility
and reciprocity, a sense of everything as interrelated and sacred.
With their nonhuman colleagues, humans take responsibility for
shaping the earth and interacting respectfully with all living beings.
In Earth Diver myths (common in the Northeast), for instance, a
spirit being (often Sky Woman) descends from the sky to a watercovered earth. Animals volunteer to dive deep to the bottom of the
water to retrieve some soil upon which Sky Woman may rest.
Often after four attempts involving great effort and sacrifice, a tiny
morsel of soil is brought up. (In many indigenous cultures, four is a
sacred number associated with the four cardinal directions, the four
elements, the four ages of human beings, the four seasons, and so
on.) In the Northeast, Turtle offers her strong, round back as the
support for the soil, the reason earth is often referred to as Turtle
Island.
In Emergence myths (common in the Southwest), prehumans move
up within the earth, changing form and consciousness as they
move from one world to another, until they emerge into this world,
the Fifth World for many cultures. The Kiowa are said to have
emerged into this world through a hollow log. The Navajo describe
a series of emergences. They began in the First World as insectlike
Air-Spirit People, then moved successively into the Second World
of Swallow People, the Third World of Yellow Grasshopper
People, and the Fourth World of People Who Live in Upright
Houses. In the Fourth World, First Man and First Woman were
created simultaneously from two ears of corn, the people learned
agriculture, and they resolved to do "nothing unintelligent" that
would create disorder. Finally, they emerged into the Fifth World
of Earth-Surface People in which we live today. Emergence can be
understood in psychological as well as physical terms; over time,
humans transform from one state of being into another until they
emerge into their current cultural identity. In some cultures, male
spiritual leaders meet in a kiva, a subterranean ceremonial room
sometimes described as representing the womb of Mother Earth.
Descending into a kiva is a symbolic return to their origins. Each
time the participants emerge from the kiva, they reenact the
Emergence, thus reminding the gathered community of their
connection to the earth and their shared origins.
In addition to Earth Diver and Emergence origin narratives, some
creation myths describe how human beings are created from the
clay on earth's surface. In one version from the northern Plains,
Trickster experiments with constructing humans from clay and
baking them. He proceeds by trial and error until he has baked
humans in various hues. Similarly, the red pipestone deposits of
what is now southwestern Minnesota are sometimes described as
the congealed blood of the ancestors · a link to familial and
cultural history through a specific site and a particular collection of
narratives associated with it.
Finally, some creation cycles combine more than one type of
origin narrative. According to Young Bear, before the "Mesquakie
or Red Earth People . . . were sculpted from the earth," O ki ma, a
"human being who came from the very flesh and blood of Creator's
heart" was brought into being to guide the people through creation
(p. 95). Like O ki ma, Earthdiver (Muskrat) contributed to the
beginnings of the earth. Whether humans emerge from, dive for, or
are created from it, Earth is at the center of indigenous selfdefinition. Thinking of origin myths may help explain why Allen
says that for a Native person to say "I am the earth" is not a
metaphor.
Native American myths are enacted in ceremonies, and both myth
and its ritual reenactment in ceremony articulate an orientation to
the natural world. As noted earlier, Native Americans often see
themselves in relation to, not separate from, the earth, its creatures,
and its cycles; they envision reciprocity (between and among
living beings) rather than hierarchy (in which humans have
dominion over animal and plant life). But these are ideals, not
always realities; thus, ceremonies are necessary to restore
harmony, the natural and desired state. Ceremonies, then, are a
means to reconnect to self, community, nature, and the cosmos.
The patterns and symbolism of ceremonies are not arbitrary.
Rather, they arise from a specific landscape. Throughout the arid
Southwest, for instance, water is central to most ceremonies. The
parallelisms and variable repetitions of songs may be arranged into
desirable meteorological patterns, particularly those that bring rain,
thus ensuring crops and the continued well-being of the people.
Even when the ceremony is performed to heal an individual,
because one person is intimately interconnected to everything, it is
understood that the ceremony will restore balance to the
community and the entire natural world as well. For example, in
the Night Chant, a nine-day Navajo healing ceremony, the singer
calls forth "dark clouds," "abundant showers," male rain, female
rain, and the fecund results of rain, such as "abundant vegetation,"
"abundant pollen," "abundant dew" · all central to survival in a dry
land (Bierhorst, p. 295). By the end of the ceremony, described by
John Bierhorst, through the power of ritual language and
action, hozho · harmony, beauty, order · has been restored for
individual, community, and cosmos. Oral traditions reflect how an
intimate relationship with the natural world is central to a Native
American sense of identity. Equally important is how oral
literatures (ceremonies and narratives) teach each generation how
to restore and maintain balance · how, as Abenaki writer and
storyteller Joseph Bruchac says in "The Circle Is the Way to See,"
to "recognize our place as part of the circle of Creation, not above
it" (p. 263).
Written Literatures
A sense of place continues to be a fundamental theme in literature
written by Native Americans in the twentieth century. On the one
hand, the land is associated with home (often homeland) and
tradition; on the other hand, land is a reminder of the loss of land,
life, and culture under colonialism. More often than not, when
protagonists of Native American novels return to their homelands,
the homecoming is a means to find their Indian identities, to
reconnect to their histories and cultures.
"The story of my people and the story of this place are one single
story," a Taos Pueblo man is reported to have said (Ortiz, "Indian /
White Relations," p. 11). For Native writers, said Bruchac in a
lecture, autobiography and nature writing are basically the same
thing, because "you can't tell your story without telling the story of
the earth." He cites the example of studies of Native American
kindergarten children who drew pictures in which they were
depicted as tiny figures in a vast natural setting that included
animals and plants. The fact that non-Indian psychologists
interpreted the children's drawings as indicative of "low selfesteem" suggests the wide gap between European American and
Native American notions of nature. A Native interpretation,
according to Bruchac, is that the children show a healthy sense of
themselves as part of, not dominant over, the natural world. This
may be one reason so many of those who related their life stories
to European American amanuenses in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries refused to speak of their experiences after
removal onto reservations. How could they tell their life stories
when they were removed from the land that animated their entire
histories and cultures?
According to many Native American writers past and present, the
land itself is storied. Hunting stories may have been entertaining,
but they also educated listeners about animal migration paths,
water holes, and geographic landmarks. As Silko explains in her
essay "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination," such tales
mapped a terrain and the relationships upon and within it. These
stories literally assisted survival. A landmark noted in the narrative
might serve as a map to help the listener to find his or her way
home. Perhaps more important, stories of place contain the entire
history of a nation. When a narrative about the origin of a specific
mountain or rock formation is told, the people are connected to a
land, a culture, and a history.
Just as stories educate the people about geography, history, and
culture, so a specific geographic site recalls these tales to the
people. Ortiz tells a story about the time he took a trip to
southwestern Colorado with a fellow Tewa Pueblo Indian who had
never been in that part of the country. At a certain point, his friend
began to recognize the terrain from the stories he had heard all his
life from the elders. He repeated "tale after tale of events in the
early life of our people" that had taken place in that area. We
"began to realize," says Ortiz, "that we were retracing a portion of
the ancient journey of our people." Finally, the distinction between
present and past was blurred as the two men thought of their
ancestors who had made similar pilgrimages. "He had heretofore
never journeyed here," explains Ortiz, "but now it was as if he had
come home" (Beck and Walters, The Sacred, p. 78; Ortiz, "Look to
the Mountaintop," pp. 89-90). Place, animated by story, links past
and present, departed ancestors and the living.
Whereas Ortiz links the land to San Juan Pueblo history, Silko
relates the land to Laguna Pueblo mythology. She tells the story of
a "giant sandstone boulder about a mile north of Old Laguna," a
place that always evokes the "story about Kochininako, Yellow
Woman, and the Estrucuyo, a monstrous giant who nearly ate her"
("Landscape," p. 89). The Twin Hero Brothers killed the giant, cut
his heart out, and threw it as far as possible. The "monster's heart
landed there," explains Silko, as if she is pointing it out to us,
"where the sandstone boulder rests now" (p. 89). Of course, she
admits, the boulder may have excited the people to compose an
etiological tale, but that does not account for why that particular
boulder has a story and many others do not. It is not possible to
determine which came first, the story or the land. Finally, Silko
concludes that unlike European Americans, for Pueblo people,
place (not time) is central to narrative.
Allen's essay "The Autobiography of a Confluence" illustrates both
Ortiz's sense of the narrative mappings of the earth and Silko's
insistence on the centrality of place in narrative. The land, the
people, and the history are linked by spatial networks · particularly
highways · and by temporal networks · the stories, not official
metanarratives but rather human-interest stories, what some might
refer to as gossip, stories that link over time and space. Allen
literally maps her past, present, and future, all linked by three
central themes: the land, the family, and the road. She describes the
Southwest (where she grew up on the Cubero Land Grant, in New
Mexico) as the "confluence of cultures." Allen's New Mexico is
not simply the tricultural state (Natives, Chicanos, and Anglos), as
it has been called in travel brochures, but a mixture of "Pueblo,
Navajo and Apache, Chicano, Spanish, Spanish-American,
Mexican-American . . . Anglo," including "Lebanese and
Lebanese-American, German-Jewish, Italian-Catholic, GermanLutheran, Scotch-Irish-American Presbyterian, halfbreed (that is,
people raised white-and-Indian), and Irish-Catholic" (Swann and
Krupat, I Tell You Now, p. 145).
Situating herself at the house in which she grew up, Allen's
persona scans the horizon, noting the mountain to the north, the
hills to the east, and the paved road to the south. She follows the
road, which traces the contours of the land · in this case, along the
arroyo · until it parts from the arroyo; then she traces how the
arroyo joins the "San Jose River [that] eventually meets the Rio
Puerco, which, in its turn, joins the Rio Grande" on its way south
to Mexico and the Gulf (p. 146). Returning to the road, she follows
it from Albuquerque east through Tijeras Canyon, stopping to
point to Texas, Oklahoma, the Plains and the East beyond.
In the next section, Allen sets out on the road again, guiding the
reader along "Old Highway 66," noting landmarks:
If you go right on the old highway out of Cubero, from
the cattle guard southwest of the village, you will pass King Cafe
and Bar, where the wife shot the husband a few years ago and got
out on $10,000 bail; next comes Budville, once owned by the
infamous Bud, who was shot in a robbery. The main robber
murderer later married Bud's widow. They were living happily
ever after, the last I heard, and it served old Bud right. Or so most
people around there believed. (p. 148)
She points out the Dixie Tavern, the Villa (which includes a café,
motel, and general store), Bibo's, and many other places. These are
not historical or geographical landmarks but places where people
gather, just off the highway, for rest and replenishment. What is
particularly striking is that these places are inhabited by people and
stories, past and present. Allen's detailed descriptions of the land
are interspersed with those of the landmarks. Occasionally, she
will stop at the top of a hill, for instance, and describe the vista. All
are connected, not only by the road but also by the stories of those
who lived there in the past and live there in the present.
In this section Allen also turns west, describing key towns and
cities · Grants, Milan, Gallup. Then, just as she invokes the
monolithic East at the conclusion of the last section, she describes
the West represented by California, a place where edges and
extremes converge. By the end of the essay, having mapped her
physical, cultural, and spiritual geography, Allen describes herself
as living in the "confluence" · the space between West and East,
the coming together of many cultures. The Road "has many
dimensions," she says; "it exists on many planes; and on every
plane it leads to the wilderness, the mountain, as on every plane it
leads to the city, to the village, and to the place beneath where
lyatiku waits, where the four rivers meet, where I am going, where
I am from" (p. 154). Here she provides an image of overlapping
communities, notes her ability to reside in or traverse those
communities (unlike others, who feel stuck between them), links
past and future with the autobiographical present, reconciles
opposites, and illustrates that the first-person construction is
always plural · connected to people and place.
Although an intimate connection to a particular place is crucial for
Native American identity, historical dispossession and removal
make it not always possible for Native people to know a sense of
place by living in their homelands. In fact, the metanarrative of
American history · that Europeans marched across the continent,
naming and claiming the land of American Indians as part of the
grand scheme of Manifest Destiny · relies on the idea of a
conveniently "vanishing" (because "savage") Indian. For those
many American Indians who live in urban settings or who have no
established homelands to which to return, a memory of place often
suffices. Rather than a specific homeland, such writers may, as
Rayna Green suggests for Native women writers, present the Road
· a place that suggests continually being on the way · as home.
That may be why memory is a central theme of contemporary
poetry and prose by Native American writers. An identification
with the land, then, is based not only on where one resides but also
on an orientation to that land or to the memory or history of that
place.
William Bevis offers one of the most insightful and comprehensive
considerations of the depiction of nature in Native American
writing. "Native American nature," he concludes, "is urban." That
is to say, the "woods, birds, animals, and humans are all
‘downtown,’ meaning at the center of action and power, in
complex and unpredictable relationships" ("Native American
Novels," p. 601). Ultimately, nature is home. It is not surprising,
then, that as Bevis notes, in Native American novels the
protagonists are all returning home (or at least trying to do so),
whereas in European American novels (by men), they are leaving
home, lighting out for the territory, in search of new frontiers. In
her forthcoming essay, "Recollections," Inés Hernández-Avila
situates this discussion in feminist terms when she explains that for
many Native American female writers and activists, the "concern
with ‘home’ involves a concern for homeland." When colonizers
displaced indigenous people, they disrupted Native homes so that
the "domestic sphere of home" necessarily became the public
sphere. Forcible relocations resulted in leaving not only a
homeland but also a home language. Hernández-Avila argues that
"this relocation home," both physical and linguistic, can be a "site
of contestation and reconciliation."
Many scholars have commented on the optimism of contemporary
Native American novels, how writers suggest the potential for
reconciliation, the possibility of reconnecting to a past that was
violently wrenched from Native control and to indigenous religions
and cultures that were suppressed or outlawed. Whereas modern
and postmodern novels by European American writers generally
emphasize fragmentation, alienation, and emptiness that remain
perpetually unresolved, many Native American novels suggest,
even if only faintly, the possibility of renewal and reconnection.
Usually this transformation occurs through a return to one's
homeland and ancestral culture.
Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn, patterned in part after the
Navajo Night Chant, tells the story of a returning World War II
veteran. The novel begins with Abel's return to Walatowa, the
ancient name of Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. In his drunken
state, Abel does not recognize his grandfather, one sign of his
spiritual blindness. Furthermore, he is inarticulate, lacking a voice
to define or even acknowledge his own existence. After killing a
man and serving time in prison, Abel returns again to Walatowa,
where, after his grandfather's death, he joins the ceremonial
runners, thereby hinting at the beginning of his healing, that is, his
eventual reintegration into the community. By the end of the novel,
he begins to see the land (and himself) more clearly, and he finds
at least a faint voice in ceremonial song.
Like House Made of Dawn, Silko's novel Ceremony (1977) centers
on the experiences of a World War II veteran, a mixed-blood
Pueblo Indian, who returns to his reservation. Tayo begins the
novel as white smoke, invisible and voiceless. His illness is due
not only to war fatigue but also to his separation from self,
community, and earth, which began before the war. His mixedblood status and his family's shame at his mother's off-reservation
life colored by too much alcohol and too many men are
symptomatic of a much more expansive illness: a disconnection of
cosmic proportions. Throughout the novel, Tayo's story is
connected to Laguna Pueblo myth, and both are connected to the
earth. Silko tells a multilayered story on two levels: the mythic in
poetry form and the contemporary narrative of Tayo in prose. Just
as his illness is reflected in the drought, so Tayo's healing parallels
the healing of the earth.
It takes a collective effort to help Tayo. The old-time medicine
man, Ku'oosh, is unable to assist him. Although he is trained in
traditional healing, he was never prepared to cure a warrior who is
not even sure he killed someone. New diseases need new medicine,
so Ku'oosh refers Tayo to the mixed-blood Navajo healer Betonie,
who lives in a hogan crammed with calendars and phone books in
the foothills overlooking Gallup. Betonie begins the ceremony that
Tayo, with the help of many · particularly Night Swan and Ts'eh ·
must complete. Ts'eh, an embodiment of Yellow Woman, or a
spirit being from the northern mountains, teaches Tayo about
medicinal plants and caring for the earth and other people. Their
lovemaking is described in images of earth, as if his union with
Ts'eh is a reunion with Mother Earth (from whom the people have
become disconnected, as reflected in the drought). Tayo's journey
parallels the mythic journey to restore balance to the earth.
Personal, community, and cosmic healing are related and
impossible to bring about in isolation.
In all his work Momaday invokes the power of place and the
memories it inspires. For Momaday, as for Silko, the "events of
one's life, take place, take place" (The Names, p. 142). That is to
say, life experiences are rooted in the earth. Although he was born
in Oklahoma, he grew up at Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. "I
existed in that landscape, and then my existence was indivisible
with it" (The Names, p. 142), he explains. In The Way to Rainy
Mountain (1969), using three narrative modes, Momaday recalls
several journeys: mythic, historical, and personal. He begins by
recalling the Kiowa emergence myth. Then he retraces the Kiowa
migration from the Yellowstone into the southern Plains, to his
grandmother Aho's house in what is now Oklahoma.
In addition, Momaday explains the origin of Devils Tower and the
Big Dipper. One day, he says, a little boy and his seven sisters
were out playing. As the boy chased his sisters, he was pretending
to be a bear, and as his sisters ran, they pretended to be afraid. But
soon the boy metamorphosed into a real bear, and the girls' pretend
fear turned to genuine terror. To escape the claws of their brotherturned-bear, the girls jumped onto a tree stump. When the bearbrother got too close, the stump grew tall, elevating the sisters to
safety. The brother reached up to grasp his sisters, scoring the tree
with his huge claws. The miraculously tall tree stump, its
circumference scored all around by the bear's scratches, turned into
Devils Tower, and the seven sisters, elevated into the sky, became
the seven stars of the Big Dipper. "From that moment, and so long
as the legend lives," writes Momaday, "the Kiowa have kinsmen in
the night sky" (Way, p. 8). The tale links the Kiowa to both
terrestrial and celestial relations, just as the emergence and
migration narratives do. In the process of retelling these stories,
Momaday links himself to the land as well as to Kiowa history and
culture.
Momaday continues his emphasis on the shaping influence of the
land in his autobiography, The Names: A Memoir (1976),
published seven years after The Way to Rainy Mountain. He
describes his visit to Tsoai, better known today as Devils Tower ·
the monolith dominating the plains of northeastern Wyoming. By
contact with that place and the stories it embodies, he is linked to
his Kiowa ancestors. As he did in The Way to Rainy Mountain,
Momaday begins with the Kiowa origin myth. This time, though,
in the epilogue he describes his imaginative journey back to his
source, stopping along the way at Devils Tower, finally arriving at
his destination: the "hollow log there in the thin crust of the ice"
(The Names, p. 167). If The Way to Rainy Mountain is the story of
Momaday's journey of return to his grandmother's house, to
Oklahoma, and to Kiowa history, here Momaday tells the story of
his return to the site of Kiowa origin, a place both geographic and
imagined that links the writer to a mythic, historical, and cultural
past reimagined in the present. A specific place, like Devils Tower,
may initiate personal memories, but, more important, as Charles
Woodward notes, such a place embodies and evokes profound
cultural memories (Ancestral Voice, p. 211).
Louise Erdrich , a Turtle Mountain Ojibwa · German American
writer, is best known for her set of novels: Love Medicine (1984;
enl. ed., 1993), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The
Bingo Palace (1994). In her tetralogy, referred to by some scholars
as a family saga reminiscent of William Faulkner , land is most
often discussed in terms of its historic loss. Together the novels tell
the multivoiced story of several generations of Ojibwa and German
American relatives and community members in North Dakota.
Through a variety of narrative voices, Love Medicine describes the
life of several Ojibwa families on and near a North Dakota
reservation from 1934 to 1984. In The Beet Queen, Erdrich
presents a series of parallel stories taking place from 1932 to 1972.
The focus is on German American characters (with a few mixedblood characters) in the small town of Argus, North
Dakota. Tracks, narrated by only two voices · Nanapush and
Pauline · relates the history of a few Ojibwa family members from
the great influenza epidemic of 1912 to the federal government's
granting of citizenship to Indians in 1924. In The Bingo Palace,
Erdrich gathers together all the reservation families in the present
by focusing on Lipsha Morrissey, who is related by blood or
adoption to many of the characters. In all four books the land is
central. All the characters are shaped by the flat, wide-open spaces
and the dramatic weather of North Dakota. Erdrich's interlocking
stories focus on relations with land, community, and family and on
the power of these relations · remembered, reimagined, and
narrated · to resist cultural loss. The goal, she says, is to "tell the
stories of the contemporary survivors while protecting and
celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of catastrophe"
("Where I Ought to Be," p. 23).
As in so many other Native American novels, homecomings are
important in Erdrich's novels. If, as she has said, "people and place
are inseparable," the desire to return to family and community may
be strong, even though it is not always possible. Love
Medicine begins with June Kashpaw, a "long-legged Chippewa
woman" (p. 1993 ed., p. 1) who ran away from home, leaving
behind the reservation, an abusive husband, and a child. Living in
anonymous poverty, disconnected from her past, her family, and
herself, June seeks comfort with men, hoping each time that this
one "could be different" (p. 3). Finally, after the latest in a series of
disappointing white lovers in the "oil boomtown, Williston, North
Dakota," a somewhat intoxicated June decides to walk home
during an early spring snowstorm. "The snow fell deeper that
Easter than it had in forty years," the narrator explains, "but June
walked over it like water and came home" (p. 7). In the next
section, the reader learns that June never reached home; her death
in the snowstorm provides the occasion for all the characters to
gather together. Henry, Jr., returns home from the war, then
commits suicide. Lipsha, on the other hand, leaves briefly to
discover who he is. By the end of the novel, like his mother (June)
before him, Lipsha travels across the water to return home. Unlike
June, he is successful. Lipsha has a second homecoming in The
Bingo Palace with far more ambiguous success. Although he does
not succeed in business or love, he learns to truly care for another
when he bundles an accidentally kidnapped baby into his jacket as
he presumably freezes (just as his mother died in the snowstorm
long ago, and just as his father followed June's ghost into the
blizzard moments before). A few other characters leave and return
to the reservation (most notably Albertine, who is going to nursing
school in the nearby Twin Cities), suggesting the possibility of
moving between the European American and Ojibwa worlds.
But even more pervasive than homecomings are leave-takings, in
particular, forced removals and relocations. Forced removal from
the land results in the breakdown of family, clan, and community
relations. InTracks, Fleur loses her land. After allotment, Native
people had to pay taxes on their land. When they were unable to
pay owing to lack of money or lack of familiarity with a cash
economy or for numerous other reasons, the land was taken from
them. The pressures of this arrangement take their toll. Fleur gives
her land tax to Nector, who is to deliver the payment, but Nector
puts Fleur's money toward his own mother's land instead.
"Legally," then, Fleur's land can be confiscated. When she refuses
to vacate her land so the lumbermen who purchased the site can cut
down the trees, the government arranges for her forced removal.
In The Bingo Palace, Fleur regains her land by appealing to what
the white dispossessor, the Indian agent, knows best: greed. He
trades her the deed to her "worthless" deforested land for an
expensive, shiny automobile. Fleur retreats to her land to live on
the edge of the lake, far from the most populated part of the
reservation. But by the end of the novel, it is again one of her own
who threatens her land. Lyman Lamartine, reservation
entrepreneur, has big plans for a Las Vegas · style bingo palace to
be built on the site of Fleur's cabin.
Lulu Lamartine, Lyman's free-spirited mother, who in her senior
years turns into an activist for Indian rights, has always been
suspicious of how Europeans measure everything. "Numbers ,
time, inches, feet," Lulu reasons, are "just ploys for cutting nature
down to size" (Love Medicine, 1993 ed., p. 281). "If we're going to
measure land, let's measure right," she concludes. "Every foot and
inch you're standing on, even if it's on the top of the highest
skyscraper, belongs to the Indians" (pp. 281-282). But such an
assessment does not take into consideration the limited economic
opportunities for reservation Indians or the results of colonization.
Like Erdrich's Tracks, Chickasaw writer Hogan's first novel, Mean
Spirit (1990), focuses on Indian-white interactions and the theft of
Native land. As one way to illustrate Indian-white perspectives,
Hogan presents three viewpoints of a dramatic explosion at a local
oil refinery. In the first, a white woman called China learns "that
earth had a mind of its own," that the "wills and whims of men
were empty desires, were nothing pitted up against the desires of
earth" (p. 183). Father Dunne hears the "sound of earth speaking,"
(p. 186) but assumes it is God's voice. Michael Horse, an Indian
man, disagrees: that "wasn't the voice of God," he counters, but the
"rage of mother earth" (p. 187). While the two European American
characters are being transformed by Native perceptions (at least
they begin to think of the earth as having a voice), Horse offers an
ironic corrective to the priest's analysis.
Not all whites are transformed, like China and the priest, by their
interactions with Native people. Based on historical research into
the scandalous dealings with the Osage and the Oklahoma land
grab, Hogan tells a murderous story of a world in which human
life, particularly Indian life, is expendable for the black oil
bubbling below the surface of the earth. Even the Hill people, who
have tried to live peaceably apart from the white community, have
come down from the hills to try to allay the violent changes they
sense but do not fully understand. After they make heroic efforts to
resist removal from their home and to stay alive, the Graycloud
family's home is blown up in the middle of the night. Although the
family survives the blast, the fire line moves "like the blood of the
wounded earth" and consumes everything. The family disappears
into the inferno-lit night with only their memories.
Another dramatic exception to the dominant Native American
vision of the possibility of healing through reconnecting to Earth
and tradition is Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead (1991). It is as
if the Destroyers, who in her earlier novel Ceremony were subdued
(not destroyed), have been unleashed and rage unchecked
throughout the world, creating havoc and ruin on a global scale. A
network of crime and violence, rather than ceremony and narrative,
links the world. The land is still central, but now the focus is on its
degradation and loss. Politicians, real estate dealers, developers,
miners, and other international criminals divide land into parcels,
an image mirrored in the trade in human body parts carried on by a
seedy character named Trigg. The dismemberment and
consumption of the earth and of humans are clearly linked.
But this is not merely a literary image of postmodern
fragmentation and alienation; rather, it is a critique of colonialism's
"vampire capitalism." Silko's almost 800-page novel is an
exhaustively scathing critique of international colonialism that
imposes vampire capitalism, a network of distorted power relations
that survives by sucking the lifeblood of the people and the land.
This is not a book of doom and despair if there is comfort in a
vision of hemispheric revolution. Angelita, the Mayan
revolutionary known as La Escapia, believes that "Marx had
recited the crimes of slaughter and slavery committed by the
European colonials who had been sent by the capitalist slavemasters to secure the raw materials of capitalism · human flesh and
blood" (p. 315). By the end of the book, the dispossessed of the
world · the homeless, veterans, and indigenous people · move
independently toward the southern border of the United States for a
final confrontation.
Maps are important throughout Almanac precisely in proportion to
how they overlay artificial boundaries onto the land. Maps, tools of
capitalism, impose the illusion of individual ownership and
national boundaries. Architect Alegría designs a palatial home
built on the edge of the diminishing rain forest; Leah Blue has
grand plans to build New Venice, a town of green golf courses and
flowing canals, in the Arizona desert. Such selfish and arrogant
misuse of the land reflects the Destroyer sensibility that land is
only one of many resources to be exploited for short-term personal
gain.
Specific strengths and truths are within the land itself, Silko is
reported to have said, and they one day will be heard. Just as many
Native elders have said that the prophecies instruct the people to
wait patiently for the colonizers to destroy themselves, so Silko
suggests that all things European (not all Europeans) will pass
away. By the end of the book, she makes it clear that the earth is
really not in danger (although its inhabitants may be). Sterling, a
Laguna Pueblo Indian who seems the closest thing to a voice for
Silko in the novel, returns to the uranium mines located on the
pueblo and muses that "humans had desecrated only themselves
with the mine, not the earth. Burned and radioactive, with all
humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too
insignificant to desecrate her" (p. 762). This is an opinion she
repeats in a collection of personal prose and nature photographs
titled Sacred Water (1993).
In Sacred Water, Silko seems to return to a more positive vision
when she uses the hyacinth and datura as metaphors for the
purifying capacities of the earth. Hyacinths "digest the worst sorts
of wastes and contamination"; they can even "remove lead and
cadmium from contaminated water" (p. 72). And the datura can
"purify plutonium contamination" (p. 75). The pollutants from
uranium mines and underground nuclear test sites and the
chemicals and heavy metals from mines pollute the water. "But,"
concludes Silko, "human beings desecrate only themselves; the
Mother Earth is inviolable. Whatever may become of us human
beings, the Earth will bloom with hyacinth purple and the white
blossoms of the datura" (p. 76). Although this may be considered a
positive interpretation of the self-purifying capacities of Mother
Earth as larger and more significant than mere polluting humans, it
is optimistic only insofar as humans are seen as separate from the
natural world.
It would be inappropriate not at least to mention that the inclusive
sense of the natural world elicited by most Native American
writers challenges another western category, another binary
opposition: the natural versus the supernatural. Rather than
viewing them as opposites, what the West calls "supernatural"
might better be understood as part of the natural, at least for those
whose orientation and training prepare them to experience beyond
the five senses or beyond what the West refers to as rationality.
This may be why the spirit(ual) world is so evident in much Native
American literature. Ghosts, transformations (of people into bears,
for instance), and visitations are all part of an inclusive sense of the
natural world. They are not borrowed literary devices, like magical
realism, but a fundamentally different way of perceiving the world.
For the Kiowa writer Momaday, a "deep, ethical regard for the
land" is central to Indian identity and necessary for all humans.
Such regard demands an expansive vision, considering not only the
consequences of human actions seven generations into the future,
as the Iroquois recommend, but also the ramifications of our
actions throughout the entire (super)natural world. "We Americans
need now more than ever before," he insists, "to imagine who and
what we are with respect to the earth and sky" ("Man Made of
Words," p. 166). To reconceive an "American land ethic,"
Momaday suggests that each individual observe the natural world
with careful regard:
Once in his life, a man ought to concentrate his mind
upon the remembered earth.... He ought to give himself up to a
particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many
angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to
imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and
listensto the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the
creaturesthere and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to
recollectthe glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
(The Way to Rainy Mountain, p. 83)
To concentrate on, to surrender to, to experience with all the senses
in every season, to imagine and to remember the earth and their
position on it are, for many Native American writers, essential acts
of recuperating a connection to history and culture via a
relationship with the earth.
Selected Bibliography
PRIMARY SOURCES
John Bierhorst, ed., "The Night Chant," in Four Masterworks of
American Indian Literature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1974); Joseph Bruchac, "The Circle Is the Way to See," in Story
Earth (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1993), repr. in Family of
Earth and Sky, ed. by John Elder and Hertha D. Wong (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1994); Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984; new and enl. ed., New York:
Harper-Perennial, 1993), "Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense
of Place," in New York Times Book Review (28 July 1985), The
Beet Queen(New York: Holt, 1986), Tracks (New York: Holt,
1988), and The Bingo Palace (New York: HarperCollins, 1994);
Rayna Green, ed., That's What She Said: Contemporary Poetry
and Fiction by Native American Women (Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press, 1984); Linda Hogan, "The Kill Hole," in Parabola 13,
no. 3 (1988), repr. in Family of Earth and Sky, ed. by John Elder
and Hertha D. Wong (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), Mean
Spirit (New York: Atheneum, 1990), "Walking," in Parabola 15,
no. 2 (1990), and "What Holds the Water, What Holds the Light,"
in Parabola 15, no. 4 (1990).
D'Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded (New York: Dodd, Mead,
1936; Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1978); N. Scott
Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper & Row,
1968),The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: Univ. of New
Mexico Press, 1969), The Names: A Memoir (New York: Harper &
Row, 1976), and "The Man Made of Words," in The Remembered
Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American
Literature, ed. by Geary Hobson (Albuquerque: Red Earth Press,
1979), repr. in Family of Earth and Sky, ed. by John Elder and
Hertha D. Wong (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Simon
Ortiz, Woven Stone (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1992); Leslie
Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Viking Press,
1977), Storyteller (New York: Seaver Books, 1981; New York:
Arcade, 1989), "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,"
in Antaeus, no. 57 (1986), repr. in Family of Earth and Sky, ed. by
John Elder and Hertha D. Wong (Boston: Beacon Press,
1994), Almanac of the Dead (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1991), and Sacred Water (Tucson, Ariz.: Flood Plain Press, 1993);
Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle(Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1933; Lincoln: Univ of Nebraska Press,
1978); Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, eds., I Tell You Now:
Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers(Lincoln:
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1987); James Welch, Winter in the
Blood (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), and Fools Crow (New
York: Penguin, 1986); Ray A. Young Bear, The Invisible
Musician (Duluth, Minn.: Holy Cow! Press, 1990).
ANTHOLOGIES
Paula Gunn Allen, ed., Spider Woman's Granddaughters:
Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American
Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Beth Brant, ed., A
Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian
Women (Rockland, Maine: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1984; New
York: Firebrand Books, 1988); George W. Cronyn, ed., American
Indian Poetry: The Standard Anthology of Songs and Chants (New
York: Liveright, 1934); Arthur Grove Day, ed., The Sky Clears:
Poetry of the American Indians (New York: Macmillan, 1951;
Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964, 1971); John Elder and
Hertha D. Wong, eds., Family of Earth and Sky: Indigenous Tales
of Nature from Around the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994);
Andrea Lerner, ed.,Dancing on the Rim of the World: An
Anthology of Northwest Native American Writing (Tucson: Sun
Tracks/Univ. of Arizona Press, 1990); Craig Lesley, ed., Talking
Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories (New York:
Laurel, 1991); Duane Niatum, ed., Carriers of the Dream Wheel:
Contemporary Native American Poetry (New York: Harper &
Row, 1975), and Harper's Anthology of 20th-Century Native
American Poetry (San Francisco: HarperSan-Francisco, 1988;
Bernd C. Peyer, ed., The Singing Spirit: Early Short Stories by
North American Indians (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1989);
Kenneth Rosen, ed., The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary
Stories by American Indians (New York: Random House, 1975);
Frederick W. Turner III, ed., The Portable North American Indian
Reader (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1973); Alan R. Velie,
ed., American Indian Literature: An Anthology (Norman: Univ. of
Oklahoma Press, 1979; rev. ed., 1991), and The Lightening Within:
An Anthology of Contemporary American Indian Fiction (Lincoln:
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1991).
SECONDARY SOURCES
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in
American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), and, as
ed., Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and
Course Designs (New York: Modern Language Association,
1983); Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands, American
Indian Women: Telling Their Lives (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska
Press, 1984); Peggy V. Beck and Anna L. Walters, The Sacred:
Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life (Tsaile, Ariz.: Navajo
Community College, 1977); William Bevis, "Native American
Novels: Homing In," inRecovering the Word, ed. by Brian Swann
and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987);
Joseph Bruchac, ed., Survival This Way: Interviews with American
Indian Poets (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1987); H. David
Brumble III, American Indian Autobiography (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1988); Abraham Chapman, ed., Literature of the
American Indians: Views and Interpretations (New York: New
American Library, 1975); Laura Coltelli, ed., Winged Words:
American Indian Writers Speak (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1990); Inés Hernández-Avila, "Relocations," in American Indian
Quarterly 19 (fall 1995); Dell Hymes, "In Vain I Tried to Tell
You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Rudolf Kaiser, "Chief Seattle's
Speech(es): American Origins and European Reception,"
in Recovering the Word, ed. by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987); Karl Kroeber,
ed., Traditional Literatures of the American Indian (Lincoln: Univ.
of Nebraska Press, 1981); Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come
After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1985), and, as ed., New Voices in Native
American Literary Criticism (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution, 1993).
Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1983); Lauren Muller, "Map Making as
Speculation in Almanac of the Dead: Mapping the News" (unpub.,
1994); Robert M. Nelson, Place and Vision: The Function of
Landscape in Native American Fiction (New York: Lang, 1993);
Alfonso Ortiz, "Look to the Mountaintop," in Essays on Reflection,
ed. by E. Graham Ward (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), and
"Indian/White Relations: A View from the Other Side of the
‘Frontier,’" in Indians in American History: An Introduction, ed.
by Frederick E. Hoxie (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson,
1988); Louis Owens, Other Destinations: Understanding the
American Indian Novel (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1992);
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, Travel Writing and
Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); John Lloyd
Purdy, Word Ways: The Novels of D'Arcy McNickle (Tucson:
Univ. of Arizona Press, 1990); Jarold Ramsey, Reading the Fire:
Essays in the Traditional Indian Literature of the Far
West (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983), and, as ed., Coyote
Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon
Country(Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1977); A. LaVonne
Brown Ruoff, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction,
Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York:
Modern Language Association, 1990); Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug
Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian
Texts (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993); Brian Swann,
ed., Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral
Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983); Brian
Swann and Arnold Krupat, eds., Recovering the Word: Essays on
Native American Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1987); Gerald Vizenor, ed., Narrative Chance: Postmodern
Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (Albuquerque:
Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1989); Andrew O. Wiget, Native
American Literature (Boston: Twayne, 1985), and, as ed., Critical
Essays on Native American Literature (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985);
Hertha D. Wong, Sending My Heart Back Across the Years:
Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992); Charles L. Woodard,
ed., Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott
Momaday(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989).
Source Citation
Wong, Hertha D. "Nature in Native American
Literatures." American Nature Writers. Ed. John Elder. Vol. 2.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996. Literature Resource
Center. Web. 1 Sept. 2010.
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