LITR 4332 American Minority Literature Model Assignments Final Exam Submissions 2013

Tom Higginbotham

Ambivalence on More than One Front

While ostensibly different peoples from different places, the Hispanic and Native American Peoples in and around the United states bear significant cultural resemblances regarding their relationships towards the dominant American culture and their reactions to it.

            There has been significant discussion on the state of Mexican Americans as "Border people" That is, people who may or may not live physically on the Mexican-American border, but also live culturally on a border between assimilation and resistance, as evinced by Bless Me, Ultima's being literally constructed out of this very concept, protagonist Antonio Marez being of two cultures and not entirely sure which one to assimilate to and which to alienate, this conflict between the two and subsequent reconciliation mirroring that same sort of ambivalence found in Mexican-American culture.

            What I was slightly disappointed to see was that this concept didn't get turned backwards towards the Native Americans. While not wrestling with quite the same ambivalence, Native Americans are still very much a border people, the major distinction being that their border was rather more mobile. Most, if not all contemporary Native Americans face the same problem of being of two cultures, both Anglo and Native. Rather than attempt to reconcile th two, however, Native Americans appear to have taken a decidedly more (deservedly) antagonistic approach to the idea of assimilation, often concerned with outlasting the white man using whatever tools at their disposal, even if they come from the culture they're actively resisting such as horses (analogized heavily as cars in Love Medicine) or legal education.

            In fact, while I would normally try to avoid conflating Native American Cultures, for the purposes of this essay, much of Native American Culture has focused on how to handle this sort of duality. In the Iroquois creation story (outside source, will be linked at the bottom), the two sons of the first woman, Good Mind and Bad Mind nearly exactly reflect this antagonistic duality, Good Mind eventually outlasting and ascending merely by virtue of being good while Bad Mind falls prey to one of his own schemes. Good Mind and Bad Mind are cut from the same cloth, they are both their own beings and yet incontrovertibly connected and all Good Mind has to do before he ascends into the heavens from which his mother fell is wait for Bad Mind to bring himself to ruination, a sentiment and scenario which seems to mirror the mood and temperament of Native Americans towards the dominant culture that surrounds them.