LITR 4332: American Minority Literature

Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2005

“After that, no one spoke to me for another five hundred years” (Alexie 177).  Thus ends the short memory of Sherman Alexie’s seventh grade.  Phrases like these, loaded with a hyperbole that are both humorous and poignant, made me curious as to the manner of speaking which is common within American Indian texts.  Compared to the other minority cultures we have studied this semester, the American Indian literature seems to be particularly sensitive in its use of time and space.  I had hoped to find more detailed insight on the use of hyperbole, but instead, I came across a slew of modern writers and literature discussing how an individual (specifically an American Indian writer/storyteller) connects himself to the culture.  The consideration of time being non-linear and single-event driven is prominent but it seems also to be deeply rooted to how an individual within a community-driven culture comes to make sense of the world.  While some of the modern writers seem to mirror an ambivalent culture, the focus for most is still very much on the loss of a culture that is completely impossible to regain under current (modern life) conditions.

            William Bevis discusses the idea of “homing”, that is, the ability for an American Indian to find his identity only through the return to his culture.  He contrasts this with the Western ideals of individuality and expansion.  He writes, “The individual is the ultimate reality, hence individual consciousness is the medium, repository, and arbiter of knowledge” whereas a Native American novel is typically “’incentric,’ centripetal, converging, contracting.  The hero comes home. … [W]hat we call “regressing” to a place … is a primary mode of knowledge and a primary good” (Bevis 16).  He suggests that the identity of an individual is found through the connection with one’s family and community in “concentric circles” (18).  Going too far outward is a loss of community and going too far inward is a path towards destruction.  What this means for the American Indian writer is that identity resolves when one identifies with “a ‘self’ that is transpersonal and includes a society, a past, and a place” (19).

            While Western literature focuses primarily on the actions of the individual, Native American literature typically deals with the influence of involuntary pressures.  While I severely doubt that I (or my future students) will have to deal with losses comparable to the Indians, it is enlightening nonetheless to see how writers deal with this impact when trying to discover or define their selves.  Discussing his attempts to write an autobiography, Sidner Larson found that the mix of his own culture with the dominant lead to some interesting conflicts.  With regards to what to write about he says, “Within the postapocalypse situation of American Indians, the fact that a person would presume to tell her own stories often … becomes less important than making sure they are told” (72).  Conversely, as to how it should be written he confesses that at first he did not have the language to express all of his unique, mixed experiences.  In addition to this, he ran into the problem of authority.  Should he use the ideas and language of another culture to define his situation, or should he rely on his past (73)? 

            While these ideas were probably in the back of my mind while reading the American Indian Stories, or Alexie’s tales, I did not reach the connection of importance between modes of expression and expression of one’s identity (in addition to the expression of one’s events and actions) until pursuing this topic.  It seems natural, now, that a different concept of places and people would ultimately push a writer to incorporate these ideas, especially towards the use of personification and hyperbole.  How else would a “foreign” reader begin to sense the difference?  In a collection of interviews with Native American writers, several express a “friendly” interaction with the time and space they and their characters inhabit.

            Joy Harjo describes her writing as “a land-based language … knowing of the landscape, as something alive with personality, breathing.  Alive with names, alive with events, nonlinear.  It’s not static and that’s a very important point” (Coltelli 64).  When describing her writing process, she talks about “watching space form” and beginning with a “blur of the memory” and having a lake in heart “through which language must come” (68).  Similarly, N. Scott Momaday, the author of House Made of Dawn, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, connects a “spiritual investment in the landscape” directly to the oral tradition (91).  Simon Ortiz, whose book of poetry From Sand Creek (1981) received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry, further connects ideas of time and place with landscape and identity saying, “You recognize your birth as coming from a specific place, but that place is more than just a physical or geographical place, but obviously a spiritual place, a place with the whole scheme of life, the universe, the whole scheme and power of creation” (105).  Finally, Leslie Marmon Silko, having taken up a curiosity in post-Einsteinian views of time and space relates modern physics to the modes of living and expression of her elders.  When reading the words of an American Indian she suggests, “Don’t get upset, don’t demand to follow it in a logical step-by-step [fashion].  Just keep reading it.  Relax” (138).

            The closest explanation of hyperbole I found seems to sum up the words of all the previous writers.  Charles R. Larson, author of American Indian Fiction writes,

In all of these novels Indian consciousness is something that extends beyond race, toward some much more ethereal or spiritual construct, far removed from the mundane realities of the Indian/white confrontation.  At base, that consciousness is expressed in the writers’ shared attitudes toward the land and the rituals that give life its inner meaning, lifting it beyond the temporal toward some higher, more transcendent significance (170).

Ultimately, I found this research to be very helpful towards understanding the modes of language and its relationship to individual identity within American Indian texts.  If I was able to continue his research further, I would be interested in discovering the impact of texts that move away from the concentric/community model, such as The Death of Jim Loney.

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Bevis, William. “Native American Novels: Homing In”. Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction. Richard F. Fleck, ed. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993.

Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Larson, Charles R. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978.

Larson, Sidner. Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

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